Top 68 Henryk Sienkiewicz Quotes
#1. This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#2. Sometimes I have thought that human misery goes far beyond human imagination, - imagination has its limits, and misery, like the vast seas, appears to be without end.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#3. An excessive preponderance of an idealistic mood is harmful to society: it creates daydreaming, political Don Quixotism, hope for heavenly intervention. This is an undeniable truth
but it is also true that every extreme is harmful.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#4. They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudanese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#6. If you consider yourself a superior type, or even if you be such, let me tell you that the sum total of such superiority, is socially, a minus quantity." I
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#8. I know that even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#9. Prophet,' he said, 'Your doctrines I do not know; therefore if I accepted them, I would do it out of fear like a coward and a base man. Are you anxious that your faith be professed by cowards and base people?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#10. As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#11. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#12. In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#13. A very poor man lives upon crumbs, and smiles gratefully - through tears. 6
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#14. Ah me! what torture to have to deal with virtue, cold and merciless as the letter of the law!
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#15. As I have said, I am comparatively speaking calm, do not wish for anything, or expect anything, am resigned in fact to that kind of spiritual paralysis until the time comes when bodily paralysis carries me off, as it carried off my father.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#16. My position is such that there is no necessity for me to enter into competition with struggling humanity. As to expensive and ruinous pleasures, I am a sceptic who knows how much they are worth, or rather, knows that they are not worth anything.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#17. The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#18. I have noticed that the stoutest pessimists, when fate or men try to take something out of their lives, fight tooth and nail, and cry out as loud as the greatest optimists.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#20. What dreadful misfortune awaited them among the savage hordes intoxicated with blood?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#21. Wealth is not a hindrance, but rather a help towards attaining a proper standing in a chosen field of activity. I confess that as far as I am concerned, it has done me some service as it preserved my character from many a crookedness poverty might have exposed it to.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#22. There is probably no greater idler than myself. And I would consider myself a lazy-bones if I did not write so many volumes, and if I did not admire my diligence once I begin writing.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#23. Anxiety prepares the organism badly for an ordeal which even under more favorable circumstances would not be an easy thing to bear.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#24. They were like two poor little leaves in a storm which bore death and annihilation not only to the heads of individuals, but to whole towns and entire tribes. What hand could snatch it and save two small, defenseless children?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#25. There speaks again the sceptic; but I shall never be so intoxicated as to lose my capacity of observation.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#26. Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#28. Homesickness springs from the isolation of the soul from its surroundings.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#32. The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#33. But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#34. Youth is the one worthwhile treasure in this world, no matter how miserable the rest of life might be.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#36. Besides, my old opinions - at least, the greater part of them - are now in tatters, like a worn-out garment. But
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#37. It is not Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders, but woman; and sometimes she plays with it as with a ball.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#40. Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#42. The fact is that between the classes there is a vast gulf that precludes all mutual understanding, and makes simultaneous efforts simply impossible.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#43. In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#45. She prefers simply a life in the shape of an Apollo to that of humpbacked Pulcinello; that is her philosophy. She
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#46. I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#47. It is all my fault! But the blind man when he stumbles over a stone, curses the stone, not the blindness that made him stumble. 17
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#48. If you borrowed the very moonbeams for your head-dress, if you were a hundred times more beautiful than my fancy can paint, you would be as nothing to me, - less than nothing, because an object of aversion.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#49. Our souls are full of Gothic arches, pinnacles, twisted traceries we cannot shake off, and of which Greek minds knew nothing.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#50. It seems incredible that a man possessing so many conditions of happiness should be not only so little happy, but clearly does not see the reason why he should exist at all. It
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#52. A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#54. He began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears into the sea.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#55. Thoughts like mine are not reckoned among the delights of life. It is like the dog trying to catch his tail; he does not catch anything. I do not prove anything, only tire myself; but have the satisfaction that another day has passed, or another night gone by. I
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#56. The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#57. Day is like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the only variety.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#58. There, about a dozen times during the day, the wind drives over the sky the swollen clouds, which water the earth copiously, after which the sun shines brightly, as if freshly bathed, and floods with a golden luster the rocks, the river, the trees, and the entire jungle.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#59. Walking along the avenues, we had one of the so-called intellectual conversations, which consist a great deal in quoting names of books and authors.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#60. If the infinity of the sea may call out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too, from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#61. How utterly unprofitable my life is! These continual searchings of my mind are leading me into the desert.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#63. There is in, us a lack of the synthetic faculty which distinguishes things that are important from those that are not.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#64. Why does crime, even when as powerful as Caesar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#65. There was only one who understood me, and he understood me wrongly." Miss
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#66. It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#67. But I think happiness springs from another source, a far deeper one that doesn't depend on will because it comes from love.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#68. There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
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