A man without memories is like a cemetery where the names of the dead are missing from the crosses.
It is an intoxicating joy for the sufferer to turn his eyes away from his suffering and forget.
There comes the moment when we can no longer bear the burden of the memories that weigh on us. One by one they resurface and crush us with regret and often remorse.
The memory... repeated passion. We all have a childhood mountain. And no matter how far you carol, you find yourself on one of its paths. That's where we were made who we are.
There comes a time when we realize that everything we do will in time become a memory. It's maturity. To get to it you have to have memories.
It is an age of memories... And it is, after that, and sometimes at the same time, a cult of memories.
Everyone forgets. Here is perhaps the only secret of our strength, of the fierceness to live. Man forgets a truth, searches for it again... discovers it.
Misfortune and pain teach us the meaning of life: but it would be terrible if this teaching were to remain here forever, to paralyze us... We forget it in order to have the pleasure of searching and finding it once more. This is actually the whole story of mankind.
Memory... preserves, perpetuates, tirelessly recomposes what time has destroyed.
Memory is the only heaven from which we cannot be expelled.
An evil deed torments us not when we commit it, but much later, when we remember it; for the memory of such a deed is never erased.
The true cure for all is oblivion, the daughter of time.
Forgetfulness is the cure for all pains on earth; but not all the souls of men are like the waters that are troubled, curled and tossed in a storm, and then calm down and spread a clear luster, as if for ever they had not stirred them. Sometimes fierce pains leave behind a leaven of poison.
The memory... the perfume of the soul.
Seeking to remember as accurately as possible the time that has passed, the events you have passed through in life - both the good and the bad being the main character in some "stories" exactly reconstructed from memory, here is an action which can sometimes also have a therapeutic character...
Relived, life really begins to take on meaning and meaning; chance ceases to govern facts. What seemed desperate and haphazard is placed in a new and definitive light...
Remembering:.. continuous creation.
Memory is the intimate diary that we always carry with us.
Memory allows itself certain liberties. She leaves certain details aside and exaggerates others, according to the sense of value of the objects she touches.
The memory of most people is like an abandoned cemetery where the dead, whom they have ceased to love, lie unhonored. Any prolonged pain is an insult to human forgetfulness.
Reading is to me what exercise is to the body.
Books are the legacy that a great genius leaves to mankind and are handed down from generation to generation as a gift to posterity yet to be born.
All true creation is an enhancement of life.
For a writer, the ideal would be that he, as a human being, never lags behind what he has achieved artistically. The man and the author go hand in hand. Let the individual life of man cover that of the hero he gives us as an example.
Literary creation requires talent, sincerity, honesty; of the intense experience of the writer in the upheavals of his contemporary society, of the deep sympathy, out of conviction, towards the light sides of those upheavals, or of equally deep antipathy towards its shadow sides.
A literary work that adds nothing to our thought, to our feeling and will, to our enjoyment of life, I think is written in vain, read in vain.
There is no conscious artist who does not know what he wants when he works on a work of art. If the so-called tendency in art is reduced to this conscious will, there is no work of art without tendency.
Artistic creation is a means of culture, not civilization. It awakens and strengthens the spiritual powers of man, and thereby contributes to his perfection...
Art makes man more human, more humane, more in control of his primal instincts, and thus more apt to humanize his life and that of society...
This humanization of man is strictly necessary to go hand in hand with increasing the means of civilization...