The collection / 20 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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02Undated

لا شئ أخطر من رجل لا يخضع للطاغية

Sándor Márai / quote

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03Undated

أن تعيش يعني أحياناً أن تنتظر

Sándor Márai / quote

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04Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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05Undated

Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship?

Sándor Márai / quote

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06Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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07Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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08Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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09Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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10Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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11Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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12Undated

Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal.

Sándor Márai / quote

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13Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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14Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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15Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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16Undated

There is this question of otherness….So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of danger, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not ‘different’, and if, quite aside from opinions and convictions, they share similar natures at the deepest level.

Sándor Márai / quote

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17Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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18Undated

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.

Sándor Márai / quote

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19Undated

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

Sándor Márai / quote

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20Undated

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

Sándor Márai / quote

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