66 Quotes by Sándor Márai

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.

لا شئ أخطر من رجل لا يخضع للطاغية

Friendship is no ideal state of mind; it is a law, and a strict one, on which the entire legal systems of great cultures were built. It reaches beyond personal desires and self-regard in men's hearts, its grip is greater than that of sexual desire, and it is proof against disappointment because it asks for nothing.

Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship?

You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain.

It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter. No one is strong enough or cunning enough to avert by word or deed the misfortune that is rooted in the iron laws of his character and his life.

Il mondo non significa niente. I fatti importanti non si dimenticano mai. Di questo mi sono accorto più tardi, a mano a mano che mi avvicinavo alla vecchiaia. Ma i fatti marginali non esistono, li rimuoviamo come i sogni."[...]"A volte i dettagli hanno grande importanza. In un certo senso fungono da adesivo, fissano la materia essenziale dei ricordi..

We were quite different, but we belonged together, we were more than the sum of our two selves, we were allies, we made our own community, and that is rare in life.