Quotes About Marai

#1. Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal.

Sandor Marai

#2. You can even make facts lie.

Sandor Marai

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.

Sandor Marai

#11. It requires great spirit, an exceptionally great spirit, to suffer the success of a close relative.

Sandor Marai

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Youth always yearns for that terrifying, suspect, indifferent homeland known as the world.

Sandor Marai

#18. 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

#19. London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there.

Sandor Marai

#20. One has to endure betrayal and disloyalty and, hardest of all , another person's excellence of character or intellect

Sandor Marai

#21. 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

#22. One can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers.

Sandor Marai

#23. 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

#24. There are worse things than suffering and death ... it is worse to lose one's self-respect.

Sandor Marai

#25. 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

#26. Whoever refuses to accept a part wants the whole, wants everything.

Sandor Marai

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

Sandor Marai

#30. The deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play.

Sandor Marai

#31. 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

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

Sandor Marai

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. After reaching ninety, one ages differently from the way one aged at fifty or sixty: one ages without bitterness.

Sandor Marai

#37. Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories.

Sandor Marai

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

Sandor Marai

#39. And I know Krisztina's days and nights, her body and her soul, as well as I know my own

Sandor Marai

#40. There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them.

Sandor Marai

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship?

Sandor Marai