Top 60 Henryk Sienkiewicz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

2. “But I think happiness springs from another source, a far deeper one that doesn’t depend on will because it comes from love.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

3. “There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

4. “But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

5. “Wealth is not a hindrance, but rather a help towards attaining a proper standing in a chosen field of activity. I confess that as far as I am concerned, it has done me some service as it preserved my character from many a crookedness poverty might have exposed it to.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

6. “It is all my fault! But the blind man when he stumbles over a stone, curses the stone, not the blindness that made him stumble. 17.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

7. “If the infinity of the sea may call out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too, from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

8. “On an exhausted field, only weeds grow.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

9. “The world has robbed me of my love, time has dried up hatred, and as the living individual must feel something, I live upon what remains to me. I must also say that he who feels and lives thus does not get a surfeit of happiness.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

10. “Youth is the one worthwhile treasure in this world, no matter how miserable the rest of life might be.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

11. “I know that even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

12. “Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

13. “I consider that in dialectics I am the equal of Socrates. As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

14. “In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

15. “England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

16. “An excessive preponderance of an idealistic mood is harmful to society: it creates daydreaming, political Don Quixotism, hope for heavenly intervention. This is an undeniable truth – but it is also true that every extreme is harmful.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

17. “Day is like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the only variety.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

18. “What a strange power there is in woman! She comes in contact with a genius without portfolio, an exceptionally useless implement like me, and then, without any preaching on her part, he feels himself in duty bound to do all sorts of things he never dreamed of doing before. The.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

19. “It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

20. “Life deserves laughter, hence people laugh at it.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

21. “If we repay evil with good, then how do we repay the good?”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

22. “He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

23. “It is difficult to imagine love without generosity, without a desire to make some sacrifices. To-day.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

24. “The fact is that between the classes there is a vast gulf that precludes all mutual understanding, and makes simultaneous efforts simply impossible.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

25. “The sky is one whole, the water another.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

26. “Thoughts like mine are not reckoned among the delights of life. It is like the dog trying to catch his tail; he does not catch anything. I do not prove anything, only tire myself; but have the satisfaction that another day has passed, or another night gone by. I.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

27. “I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

28. “Sometimes I have thought that human misery goes far beyond human imagination, – imagination has its limits, and misery, like the vast seas, appears to be without end.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

29. “The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

30. “If you consider yourself a superior type, or even if you be such, let me tell you that the sum total of such superiority, is socially, a minus quantity.” I.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

31. “Tell me,′ asked Stas, ‘what is a wicked deed?’ ‘If anyone takes away Kali’s cow,’ he answered after a brief reflection, ‘that then is a wicked deed.’ ‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Stas, ‘and what is a good one?’ This time the answer came without any reflection: ‘If Kali takes away the cow of somebody else, that is a good deed.’ Stas was too young to perceive that similar views of evil and good deeds were enunciated in Europe not only by politicians but by whole nations.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

32. “Evidently the merit depends on the result of the work.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

33. “It is an altogether wrong idea that the modern product of civilization is less susceptible to love. I sometimes think it is the other way.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

34. “This homage has been rendered not to me – for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me – but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

35. “My position is such that there is no necessity for me to enter into competition with struggling humanity. As to expensive and ruinous pleasures, I am a sceptic who knows how much they are worth, or rather, knows that they are not worth anything.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

36. “I still seem to hear Sniatynski’s words: “Do not philosophize her away, as you have philosophized away your abilities and your thirty-five years of life.” I know it leads to nothing, I know it is wrong, but I do not know how not to think. 13.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

37. “Anxiety prepares the organism badly for an ordeal which even under more favorable circumstances would not be an easy thing to bear.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

38. “In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

39. “The evil genius bent upon wrecking my life had not taken in account one thing: a man crushed and utterly wretched cares less for himself than a happy one. In presence of that indifference fate becomes more or less powerless. I was and am still in that frame of mind that, if angry Fortuna came to me in person, and said: “Go to perdition,” I should reply calmly: “Be it so,“ – not out of sorrow for the loss of Aniela, but from mere indifference to everything within or without me. This.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

40. “A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

41. “She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

42. “There is probably no greater idler than myself. And I would consider myself a lazy-bones if I did not write so many volumes, and if I did not admire my diligence once I begin writing.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

43. “The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

44. “Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

45. “How utterly unprofitable my life is! These continual searchings of my mind are leading me into the desert.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

46. “There was only one who understood me, and he understood me wrongly.” Miss.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

47. “It seems incredible that a man possessing so many conditions of happiness should be not only so little happy, but clearly does not see the reason why he should exist at all. It.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

48. “It appears to me that many cultured people are attacked by the same disease. Criticism of ourselves and everything else is corroding our active power; we have no stable basis, no point of issue, no faith in life.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

49. “He who knew how to live should know how to die.”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

50. “What kind of God is this, what kind of religion is this, and what kind of people are these?”

— Henryk Sienkiewicz