Writers

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

“Как тёплому понять холодного?”

“How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?”

“Je ne décrirai pas la fin d’une passion parce que je n’en ai pas vécu. Ce que j’ai vécu, c’est la fin d’une illusion.”

“I will not describe the end of a love affair because I have never lived through one. What I have lived through is the end of a fantasy.”

“The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”

“Como explicar: minha inquietação era o meu verdadeiro eu.”

“How can I explain: my disquiet was my true self.”

“He turned and looked back at the steps he had come down. Where you've been is not important. Where you are is not important. The only thing that's important is where you're going.”

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

“生命是一袭华美的袍，爬满了蚤子。”

“Life is a gorgeous robe, crawling with fleas.”

“Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.”

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

“Человек есть тайна. Её надо разгадать, и ежели будешь её разгадывать всю жизнь, то не говори, что потерял время. Я занимаюсь этой тайной, ибо хочу быть человеком.”

“Man is a mystery. If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”

“Quien espera mucho puede esperar poco.”

“He who awaits much can expect little.”

“Il ne faut pas toujours croire que le sentiment soit tout. Dans les arts, ce n'est rien sans la forme.”

“One must not always think that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.”

“인간은 근본적으로 잔인한 것이 가능한가?”

“Is it possible that human beings are fundamentally cruel?”

“詰まるところ、人はみな物語の主人公にはなれない。誰かが観客席に座って拍手をしなくてはならない。”

“Not all of us can be the protagonist of a story. Somebody has to sit in the audience and clap.”

“Ich bin ein Suchender gewesen und bin es noch, aber ich suche nicht mehr auf den Sternen und in den Büchern; ich beginne die Lehren zu hören, die mein Blut in mir rauscht.”

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”

“L’inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme.”

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.”

“The barbarians come out at night. Before nightfall the last goatherd must be brought in and the gate barred. At dawn we go out to face the new day. That is how we live.”

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

“Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas, y entiendo que en el porvenir lo será.”

“Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”

“우리가 책을 읽는 이유는 우리가 혼자가 아니라는 것을 알기 위해서다.”

“The reason we read is to know that we are not alone.”

“Сильнее всех воинов — эти два: время и терпение.”

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”

“什么是路？就是从没路的地方践踏出来的，从只有荆棘的地方开辟出来的。”

“What is a road? It is trampled out from where there was no road, it is hacked out from where there were only brambles.”

“Soyons reconnaissants aux personnes qui nous donnent du bonheur ; elles sont les charmants jardiniers par qui nos âmes sont fleuries.”

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

“Très vite dans ma vie il a été trop tard.”

“Very early in my life it was too late.”

“Tout ce qui n’est pas moi m’est incompréhensible.”

“Everything that is not me is incomprehensible to me.”

“Boj člověka proti moci je boj paměti proti zapomění.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

“自由と独立と己れとに充ちた現代に生まれた我々は、その犠牲としてみんなこの淋しみを味わわなくてはならないでしょう。”

“You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.”

“Wierzę, że kiedy umieramy, stajemy się stronami książki, którą ktoś powoli czyta.”

“I believe that when we die, we become the pages of a book that someone is slowly reading.”

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

“I mostri esistono, ma sono troppo pochi per essere veramente pericolosi. Sono più pericolosi gli uomini comuni, i funzionari pronti a credere e ad obbedire senza discutere.”

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

“Cada cien metros el mundo cambia.”

“Every hundred feet the world changes.”

“Die Einsamkeit zeitigt das Originale, das gewagt und befremdend Schöne, das Gedicht. Die Einsamkeit zeitigt aber auch das Verkehrte, das Unverhältnismäßige, das Absurde und das Unerlaubte.”

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”

“Unsere Ausbreitung über die Erde war befeuert durch die Reduktion der höheren Vegetationsformen zu Holzkohle, durch das unablässige Verbrennen alles Brennbaren. Die menschliche Zivilisation war von jeher nichts als ein von Stunde zu Stunde intensiver werdendes seltsames Leuchten, von dem keiner sagen kann, wann es schwächer werden und wann es verlöschen wird.”

“Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever was combustible. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”

“国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。”

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.”

“私にはまだ一行、もう一行、もう一行と書きつづけてゆく以外に生きのびる方法がない。”

“I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line...”