Ivo Andric Quotes

Ivo Andric offers a stark, thoughtful look at fear and change.

18 quotes

1. From 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.

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

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

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

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

6. When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

7. 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.

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

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

10. 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.

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

12. Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

13. Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.

14. Sadness is also a kind of defence.

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

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. I do not fear invisible worlds.