Ivo Andric Quotes

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

— Ivo Andrić

2. “When I am not desperate, I am worthless.”

— Ivo Andrić

3. “I gave in to life. I was not defeated but outplayed.”

— Ivo Andrić

4. “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.”

— Ivo Andrić

5. “It seems to me, that if people only knew how hard it was for me to endure life, they would find it easier to forgive me for all the wrong things I’ve done and all the good things that I have failed to do. And they would still find a little compassion within them to pity me.”

— Ivo Andrić

6. “Searching for what I need, and I don’t even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don’t have and I’ve been searching for.”

— Ivo Andrić

7. “What doesn’t hurt – is not life; what doesn’t pass – is not happiness.”

— Ivo Andrić

8. “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.”

— Ivo Andrić

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

— Ivo Andrić

10. “One shouldn’t be afraid of the humans. Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them.”

— Ivo Andrić