Yann Martel is a Spanish-born Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. This inspirational Yann Martel quotes will inspire your life.
Best Yann Martel Quotes
- “Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess, and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.” – Yann Martel
- “Don’t worry about being good…. Aspire to be authentic.” – Yann Martel
- “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” – Yann Martel
- “I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.” – Yann Martel
- “If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?” – Yann Martel
- “There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God… These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.” – Yann Martel
- “It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterward, even unto our names.” – Yann Martel
- “Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.” – Yann Martel
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“Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.” – Yann Martel
- “I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.” – Yann Martel
- “If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don’t feel the pain of others because they haven’t imaginatively got under their skins.” – Yann Martel
- “A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.” – Yann Martel
- “Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life.” – Yann Martel, Yann Martel Quotes is from Life of Pie Book
- “It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise, you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.” – Yann Martel
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“A work of artworks because it is true, not because it is real.” – Yann Martel
- “If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” – Yann Martel
- “For the first time I noticed – as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next – that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.” – Yann Martel
- “My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.” – Yann Martel
- “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result, I perked up and felt much better.” – Yann Martel
- “When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.” – Yann Martel
- “You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!” – Yann Martel
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“…animals don’t escape from somewhere but from something” – Yann Martel
- “Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness–how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!” – Yann Martel
- “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.” – Yann Martel
- “It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It’s also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It’s a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.” – Yann Martel
- “The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.” – Yann Martel
- “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result, I perked up and felt much better.” – Yann Martel
- “My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.” – Yann Martel
- “When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.” – Yann Martel
- “Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness–how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!” – Yann Martel
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“What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.” – Yann Martel
- “I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.” – Yann Martel
- “It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.” – Yann Martel
- “It’s amazing how willpower can build walls.” – Yann Martel
- “There’s nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.” – Yann Martel
- “Jesus, Mary, Muhammad, and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!” – Yann Martel, Yann Martel Quotes teaches us we have to believe/respect all religions
- “…if you fall into a lion’s pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it’s hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it’s bloodthirsty, but because you’ve invaded its territory.” – Yann Martel
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“Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.” – Yann Martel
- “Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.” – Yann Martel
- “You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won’t be for long.” – Yann Martel
- “Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence, it exists only at one time: right now.” – Yann Martel
- “A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them great originality.” – Yann Martel
- “Music is a bird’s answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.” – Yann Martel
- “Just as music is the noise that makes sense, a painting is a color that makes sense, so a story is a life that makes sense.” – Yann Martel
- “You must take life the way it comes at you and makes the best of it.” – Yann Martel
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“Religion is more than rite and ritual.” – Yann Martel
- “We believe what we see.’…What do you do when you’re in the dark?” – Yann Martel
- “It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.” – Yann Martel
- “The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.” – Yann Martel
- “Why can’t reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there’s so little fish to catch?” – Yann Martel
- “We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.” – Yann Martel
- “My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.” – Yann Martel
- “We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.” – Yann Martel
- “Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.” – Yann Martel
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“The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.” – Yann Martel
- “The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?” – Yann Martel
- “I love Canada…It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.” – Yann Martel
- “Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.” – Yann Martel
- “How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water, and shelter?” – Yann Martel
- “Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion – and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.” – Yann Martel
