Ivo Andric Quotes

#1. I gave in to life. I was not defeated but outplayed.

Ivo Andric

#2. If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.

Ivo Andric

#3. Hope is an act of desperate defiance against monstrous odds.

Ivo Andric

#4. There is no rule without revolts and conspiracies, even as there is no property without work and worry.

Ivo Andric

#5. For a man filled with a great, true and unselfish love, even if it be on one side only, there open horizons and possibilities and paths which are closed and unknown to so many clever, ambitious, and selfish men.

Ivo Andric

#6. It was an intimate bond between the men of that generation ... for nothing brings men close together than a common misfortune happily overcome.

Ivo Andric

#7. Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

Ivo Andric

#8. I don't plan anything any more. I just live my life.

Ivo Andric

#9. The verses which he published in various reviews from time to time, and the neatly copied poems which he sent to his friends, superiors, and important personages, were neither much better nor much worse than thousands of other verse products of the day.

Ivo Andric

#10. What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness.

Ivo Andric

#11. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'.

Ivo Andric

#12. What can and doesn't have to be always, at the end, surrenders to something that has to be.

Ivo Andric

#13. One shouldn't be afraid of the humans. Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them.

Ivo Andric

#14. Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.

Ivo Andric

#15. ~beautiful soul weeps deep~

Ivo Andric

#16. I do not fear invisible worlds.

Ivo Andric

#17. Every woman has some reason to weep and weeping is sweetest when it is for another's sorrow.

Ivo Andric

#18. And then the death will come. The great parting, but the least painful of all the goodbyes we ever knew. For in death, only one shall grieve. And so far we have always, at every parting, grieved together.

Ivo Andric

#19. What does your sorrow do while you sleep? -It's awake and waiting. And when it loses patience, it wakes me up.

Ivo Andric

#20. Never can that be told, for those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift of words and those who are dead can tell no tales. Those were things which are not told, but forgotten. Fore where they not forgotten, how could they ever be repeated?

Ivo Andric

#21. For only thus, living each moment separately and looking neither forward nor back, could such a life be borne and a man keep himself alive in hope of better days.

Ivo Andric

#22. He who is not delicate flower of your soul to the winds of temptation, whatever it whole and saved and passed on to the end, it's as if it never had.

Ivo Andric

#23. Sadness is also a kind of defence.

Ivo Andric

#24. They were all there.And all of them,these days,were as if drunk with bitterness,from desire for vengeance and longed to punish and to kill whomsoever they could,since they could not punish or kill those whom they wished.

Ivo Andric

#25. When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

Ivo Andric

#26. Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.

Ivo Andric

#27. Searching for what I need, and I don't even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don't have and I've been searching for.

Ivo Andric

#28. That wild beast which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

Ivo Andric

#29. In the journal of my misery, each sorrow competes for the first place in length and strength.

Ivo Andric

#30. They looked at the paper and saw nothing in those curving lines, but they knew and understood everything, for their geography was in their blood and they felt biologically their picture of the world.

Ivo Andric

#31. Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.

Ivo Andric

#32. Whenever a government feels the need of promising peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite.

Ivo Andric

#33. Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

Ivo Andric

#34. It seems to me, that if people only knew how hard it was for me to endure life, they would find it easier to forgive me for all the wrong things I've done and all the good things that I have failed to do. And they would still find a little compassion within them to pity me.

Ivo Andric