A Quote by Honore de Balzac

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Honore de Balzac

Quote Topics

Die Does Great Less Martyr Nothing Than Writer

Quote Author

Honore de Balzac
French - Novelist
May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850

What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

E. B. White

A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

Gertrude Stein

While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live forevermore.

Theodore Roosevelt

To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.

Henrik Ibsen

There is nothing that exists so great or marvelous that over time mankind does not admire it less and less.

Lucretius

I'm not a martyr, just a musician who dies for your sins. Oh, that's what a martyr is? Very well then, I am a martyr, if you insist.

Thom Yorke

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Horace Mann

A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We should have but one desire today - the desire to die so that India may live - the desire to face a martyr's death, so that the path to freedom may be paved with the martyr's blood.

Subhas Chandra Bose

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

Hannah Arendt

love is thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail it is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea love is less always than to win less never than alive less bigger than the least begin less littler than forgive it is most sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky

e. e. cummings

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool; since the most absurd doctrines are not without such evidence as martyrdom can produce. A martyr, therefore, by the mere act of suffering, can prove nothing but his own faith.

Charles Caleb Colton

A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.

William Monahan

... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.