Sándor Márai Quotes

• Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories.

  Sándor Márai

  Memories, Fury, Purgatory

  51 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving, Guilt, Doe

  49 Copy quote

• There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them.

  Sándor Márai

  Pain, Knowing, No Pain

  24 Copy quote

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

  Sándor Márai

  Divorce, Heartfelt, Guilty

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Betrayal, Real, Character

  28 Copy quote

• And I've been waiting for you, because I couldn't do anything else. And we've both known that we would meet again, and then it would be all over with life and everything that gave our existence meaning and tension. A secret of the kind that lurks between the two of us has extraordinary power. It burns through the fabric of life like a scorching beam, and yet at the same time it also gives it tensile strength. It forces us to live.

  Sándor Márai

  Fabric Of Life, Two, Giving

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Strong, Character, Fate

  24 Copy quote

• We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly.

  Sándor Márai

  Vanity, Who We Are, Life Is

  21 Copy quote

• 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. You would like to play the piano, but the rain comes to sit alongside and play an accompaniment. And then the dry weather returns, which is to say there is steam and bright light. People age quickly.

  Sándor Márai

  Rain, Book, Light

  20 Copy quote

• I have started to think that the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock.

  Sándor Márai

  Thinking, Reminiscing, Moments

  23 Copy quote

• Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship?

  Sándor Márai

  Essence, Disinterest, Humans

  12 Copy quote

• One has to endure betrayal and disloyalty and, hardest of all , another person's excellence of character or intellect

  Sándor Márai

  Betrayal, Character, Excellence

  8 Copy quote

• Vienna, to me it was the tuning fork for the entire world. Saying the word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked. Vienna wasn't just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one's soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend.

  Sándor Márai

  Beautiful, Talking, Cities

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Honesty, Writing, Secret

  18 Copy quote

• London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there.

  Sándor Márai

  Boredom, Desert, London

  18 Copy quote

• Everything your students need to know about philosophy communicated in a way that appeals to them, as well as inspire many of them to the study of philosophy.

  Sándor Márai

  Philosophy, Inspire, Needs

  4 Copy quote

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