“It is the artist's business to
create sunshine when the sun fails. He
who has a sun in himself won’t seek for it somewhere else.” – Romain Rolland
Rolland, born on this date in 1866,
was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and
to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types
of human beings.”
He advocated for making the theater accessible
to “ordinary people” and often expressed frustration with those he was trying
to convince that this was a good idea. “Discussion
is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth but already to
possess it,” he once noted. Sounds a lot
like our political races of today, doesn’t it?
His friend Sigmund Freud said he was
profoundly influenced by Rolland’s views, especially on mysticism. Freud also was a great admirer of Rolland’s
10-volume novel Jean-Christophe,
written over an 8-year period and
setting the
“The main thing is not to accumulate
as much knowledge as possible, but to make sure that this knowledge is the
child of your own efforts,” Rolland said.
“Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepares the way for the
faith of tomorrow.”
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