75 Quotes by Romain Rolland

You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things.

Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre.... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle.

Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, foolish, mischievous.

Take possession of the air, submit the elements, penetrate the last redoubts of nature, make space retreat, make death retreat.

There are some dead who are more alive than the living.

To understand everything is to hate nothing.

Every man, every art, has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with little and many lies.

If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay.

You desire a popular art? Begin by having a "people" whose minds are liberated, a people not crushed by misery and ceaseless toil, not brutalized by every superstition and every fanaticism, a people of itself, and victor in the fight that is being waged today.