Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Ivo Andric

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

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.

Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

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

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

When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

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

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

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.

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.

There comes a time when a man finds himself in front of a dark uncrossable abyss, which he himself has spent years digging. He cannot go forward, and has no way back. Words have failed, tears won't help, and who would he call out to? He can't even remember his own name. Then the man sees that on this god's green earth there is but one true suffering: the torment of guilty conscience.

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.

To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.

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'.

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

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

I do not fear invisible worlds.

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

~beautiful soul weeps deep~

Of everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.

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

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.