writer, playwright, essayist, historian, novelist, musicologist, prose writer, biographer, musician, teacher
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1866 – 1944
Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre. ... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle.
There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people.
I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.
What I especially love in Lefebvre, is this intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will.
If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India. … For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay.
Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.
I know at last what distinguishes man from animals; financial worries.
Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all others, and if need be against all others.
In politics, he has always been a republican with advanced Socialist sympathies, and internationalist at heart, and, as they said in the eighteenth century, a "citizen of the world." He has always fought social injustice. In art, he loves, above all, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Goethe... Rembrandt is the painter dearest to him. But his chosen country is Italy.
One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.
The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe.
You are a vain fellow. You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things. A hero! ... I don't quite know what that is: but, you see, I imagine that a hero is a man who does what he can. The others do not do it.
There are some dead who are more alive than the living." "Then if they are still young we can find them for ourselves.... But I don't believe it. What has been good once never is good again.
All these young millionaires were anarchists, of course: when a man possesses everything it is the supreme luxury for him to deny society: for in that way he can evade his responsibilities
It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.
The continual endeavor of man should be to lessen the sum of suffering and cruelty: that is the first duty of humanity.
If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.
Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.
If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.
Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.
It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.
One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.