Sandor Marai Quotes & Sayings

There's a feeling of shame that is more painful than any other in life; it's the shame felt by the victim who is forced to look his killer in the eyes, as if he were the creature bowing before its creator. — Sandor Marai

After reaching ninety, one ages differently from the way one aged at fifty or sixty: one ages without bitterness. — Sandor Marai

Youth always yearns for that terrifying, suspect, indifferent homeland known as the world. — Sandor Marai

Because no one can live with just the bare necessities in the real world ... we need a little superfluity in our lives, something dazzling, something that sparkles, something lovely, however cheap or worthless. Few people can live without the dream of beauty. — Sandor Marai

A man who has signed away his soul and his fate to solitude is incapable of faith. He can only wait. For the day or the hour when he can talk about everything that forced him into solitude with the man or men who forced him into that condition. He prepares himself for that monument for ten or forty or forty-one years the way one prepares for a duel. He brings his affairs into order in case he dies in the duel. And he practices every day, as professional duelists do. And what weapon does he practice with? With his memories, so that he will not allow solitude and time to cloudd his sight and weaken his heart and his soul. There is one duel in life, fought without sabers, that nonetheless is worth preparing for with all one's strength. And it is the most dangerous. And one day the moment comes. — Sandor Marai

London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there. — Sandor Marai

Everything your students need to know about philosophy communicated in a way that appeals to them, as well as inspire many of them to the study of philosophy. — Sandor Marai

One can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers. — Sandor Marai

One has to endure betrayal and disloyalty and, hardest of all , another person's excellence of character or intellect — Sandor Marai

Vienna, to me it was the tuning fork for the entire world. Saying the word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked. Vienna wasn't just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one's soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend. — Sandor Marai

It requires great spirit, an exceptionally great spirit, to suffer the success of a close relative. — Sandor Marai

We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly. — Sandor Marai

You can even make facts lie. — Sandor Marai

Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship? — Sandor Marai

Life becomes bearable only when one comes to terms with who one is, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the world. — Sandor Marai

The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it's worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake. — Sandor Marai

Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal. — Sandor Marai

And I know Krisztina's days and nights, her body and her soul, as well as I know my own — Sandor Marai

The world spares only those who remain modest and humble - and even then only for an interval, no more. — Sandor Marai

But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language. — Sandor Marai

I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is to take the givens of one's fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can. That is the most we can accomplish. — Sandor Marai

It's the moment when something happens not just deep among the trees but also in the dark interior of the human heart, for the heart, too, has its night and its wild surges, as strong an instinct for the hunt as a wolf or a stag. The human night is filled with the crouching forms of dreams, desires, vanities, self-interest, mad love, envy, and the thirst for revenge, as the desert night conceals the puma, the hawk and the jackal. — Sandor Marai

There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them. — Sandor Marai

Tomorrow, everyone who is beautiful will come under suspicion. As will those with talent and those with character." His voice was hoarse. "Don't you understand? To be called beautiful will be an insult; talent will be called a provocation, and character an outrage. Because it's their turn now, and they will appear everywhere, from everywhere, emerging in their hundreds of millions and more. Everywhere. The ugly ones, the talentless, those without any character. And they'll throw vitriol in the face of beauty. They will tar and slander talent. They will stab through the heart anyone with character. They're here already ... And there'll be more of them. Be careful! — Sandor Marai

The whole business of the bourgeois and the class war was different from what we proles were told. These people were sure they had a role in the world; I don't mean just in business, copying those people who had had great power when they themselves had little power. What they believed was that when it came down to it, they were putting the world into some sort of order, that with them in charge, the lords of the world would not be such great lords as they had been and the proles would not remain in abject poverty, as we once were. They thought the whole world would eventually accept their values; that even while one group moved down and another one up, they, the bourgeois, would keep their position - even in a world where everything was being turned upside down. — Sandor Marai

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. — Sandor Marai

We have done everything within the scope of modern medicine.' Those are just words. They apparently did everything within their erratic knowledge and the limits of their vanity. — Sandor Marai

There are worse things than suffering and death ... it is worse to lose one's self-respect. — Sandor Marai

And like everyone whom the gods spoil without reason, I feel a kind of anxiety buried at the heart of my happiness. It's all too beautiful, too flawless, too complete. — Sandor Marai

Then I understood that a survivor has no right to bring a complaint. Whoever survives has won his case, he has no right and no cause to bring charges; he has emerged the stronger, the more cunning, the more obstinate, from the struggle. — Sandor Marai

And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our act. Everything turns on our intentions. — Sandor Marai

Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent. — Sandor Marai

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. — Sandor Marai

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. — Sandor Marai

Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it. — Sandor Marai

Because it's not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Calm and extraordinarily, terrifyingly lonely. — Sandor Marai

And I've been waiting for you, because I couldn't do anything else. And we've both known that we would meet again, and then it would be all over with life and everything that gave our existence meaning and tension. A secret of the kind that lurks between the two of us has extraordinary power. It burns through the fabric of life like a scorching beam, and yet at the same time it also gives it tensile strength. It forces us to live. — Sandor Marai

What once made our hearts burn until we thought we would either die or kill someone ... all that is less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyards.
When we demand fidelity are we wishing for the other person's happiness? ... And if we dont love the person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other?! — Sandor Marai

The deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play. — Sandor Marai

There are times I almost believe that anything possible to be done should be done, not just because it's good or makes sense, simply because it's possible. — Sandor Marai

Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories. — Sandor Marai

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. — Sandor Marai

You see what I mean? Being rich must be a condition, much like sickness or health. Say you are rich, you might, in some mysterious way, be rich forever, but however much money you have, you never feel properly rich. Maybe you need to believe in your wealth in order to be properly rich - I mean, the way saints and revolutionaries believe they are different. And you can't afford to feel guilty if you are rich: if you felt guilty for a second you'd be finished. The not-truly-rich, those who have visions of the poor while indulging in a beefsteak and drinking Champagne, will eventually lose out, because they are insincere in their wealth. They're not rich out of conviction, they are only pretending, cowardly, sneakily, to be rich. You have to be very disciplined to be rich. You can perform a few charitable acts, but only as a kind of a fig leaf. — Sandor Marai

I was surrounded by trust and affection. No one could ask more of life, it is the greatest blessing of all. — Sandor Marai

I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe. — Sandor Marai

There isno feeling sadder or more hopeless than the coolingof a friendship between two men. Between a man anda woman a delicate web of terms and conditions is always negotiated. Between men, on the other hand, the deep sense of friendship rests on its selflessness: we expect no sacrifices, no tenderness from each other, all we want is to preserve a pact wordlessly made between us. Perhaps I was really the guilty one, because I did not know you well — Sandor Marai

Sin is not just what the catechism says it is. Sin is not simply that which we commit. Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do. — Sandor Marai

Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised. One can only dominate another human soul if one knows, understands, and with the utmost tact despises the person one is subjugating. — Sandor Marai

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. — Sandor Marai

That is our fate... One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy. — Sandor Marai

Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives? And that if we have experienced this much, then perhaps we haven't lived in vain? Is passion so deep and terrible and magnificent and inhuman? Is it indeed about desiring any one person, or is it about desiring desire itself? That is the question. Or perhaps, is it indeed about desiring a particular person, a single, mysterious other, once and for always, no matter whether that person is good or bad, and the intensity of our feelings bears no relation to that individual's qualities or behavior? — Sandor Marai

I have started to think that the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock. — Sandor Marai

My homeland,' says the guest, 'no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What's left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything's come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. — Sandor Marai

No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence. — Sandor Marai

Whoever refuses to accept a part wants the whole, wants everything. — Sandor Marai

[U]nder even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance. — Sandor Marai

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. — Sandor Marai

I don't like such "great questions" - my view is that life consists of a million little questions and that it is always only the totality of those that really matters. — Sandor Marai

Their hearts and guts never had a moment of peace. They were afraid that all the calculations, all the planning, all that keeping things tidy, weren't worth anything: that one day it would all be over. But what did they really think would be over? The family? The factory? The money? No, these people knew that what they were afraid of was nowhere near so simple. What they were afraid of was that one day they'd have no energy left and be too tired to hold things together ... that everything they had scraped together would fall apart, and then their "culture" would be done for. — Sandor Marai

Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one's priorities; one's sentimental and psychological values go out the window. — Sandor Marai