Jacques Lusseyran

Jacques Lusseyran (19 September 1924 – 27 July 1971) was a French author and political activist. He was blinded at age 7 and at 17 formed a resistance group in Nazi occupied France, for which he was later sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He later wrote an autobiography: And There Was Light.

• I am certain that children always know more than they are able to tell, and that makes the big difference between them and adults, who, at best, know only a fraction of what they say. The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole beings, while we know it only with our heads.
  • p. 7

• The men over thirty round about us were afraid: for their wives and their children — these were real reasons; but also for their possessions, their position, and that is what made us angry; above all for their lives, which they clung to much more than we did to ours. We were less frightened than they were. The years ahead would prove the point. Four-fifths of the Resistance in France was the work of men less than thirty years old.
  • p. 156

• Friendship was salvation, in this fragile world the only thing left that was not fragile. I promise you one can be drunk on friendship as well as on love.
  • p. 216

• fear kills, and joy maintains life.
  • p. 253

• Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed. Work and work hard.
  • pp. 260-261

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Jacques Lusseyran