Re-Kindling the fire in your heart | LitBash 49

A book will light a fire in your heart. Pick a book by a writer who was...

Born this week:

Voltaire, France
"What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbor's, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

George Eliot, UK
"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."

Andre Gide, France
"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore."

Charles Vildrac, France

Mats Traat, Estonia

Carlo Collodi, Italy

Lope de Vega, Spain

Eugene Ionesco, France / Romania
"No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."

Died this week:

Jack London, USA
"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog."

Aldous Huxley, UK
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

C. S. Lewis, UK
"100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."

Anthony Burgess, UK

Andre Malraux, France
"One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say."

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Denmark

Upton Sinclair, USA
"American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it."

Yukio Mishima, Japan
"There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess."

Arnold Zweig, Germany

Alexandre Dumas, France
"It is sometimes essential to government to cause a man’s disappearance without leaving any traces, so that no written forms or documents may defeat their wishes. It has always been so and always will be. Governments change yet they remain all alike."

Eugene O'Neill, USA
"One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless."