Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 12

He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
...the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole. -pg. 19
Félix J. Palma
that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Be first the master of yourself
Baltasar Gracián
Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.
Salvador Dalí
No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.
Maimonides
Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.
Pablo Casals
You must be wondering how anyone could choose the left path and sacrifice their children. But it's not that simple, my dear, because when you decide to take the second path you never allow yourself to see reality as it is, without excuses. You tell yourself that if you don't pursue your own happiness, they'll suffer too; that you have a right to be happy and you only get one life; that it'll be better for them, they're young, they'll get over it. But the truth is, you make a choice and there is always a price to pay.
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera
Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are three types of friends: those like food without which you can't live those like medicine which you need occasionally and those like an illness which you never want.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
God is the only one who listens to her... she is the prototype of the devout woman who perseveres in prayer, convinced that it will be heard... How many favours each of us could tell of if we recalled with gratitude the gifts we have received in order to praise God for them!
University of Navarra
Winning isn't about finishing in first place. It isn't about beating the others. It is about overcoming yourself. Overcoming your body, your limitations, and your fears. Winning means surpassing yourself and turning your dreams into reality.
Kilian Jornet
Cautious silence is the refuge of good sense
Baltasar Gracián
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco de Goya
[She] had the indefinable charm of someone who said little but thought much. Miss Prim had always felt that such people were at a marked advantage. They never said anything tactless, never spouted nonsense, never had cause to regret their words or justify themselves.
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera
Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.
Núria Añó
The two friends went on and on toward the sierra, at times keeping the highway, at times. deviating from it.Whenever they passed through a town or a hamlet, the slow peal of bells tolling the death-knell announced to our hero that the Angel of Death was not losing his time; that his arm reached to every part of the world, and that, though Gil felt it now weighing upon his breast like a mountain of ice, none the less did it scatter ruin and desolation over the entire surface of the earth.As they went, the Angel of Death related many strange and wonderful things to his protege.The foe of history, he took pleasure in scoffing at its pretended utility, in disproof of which he narrated many facts as they had actually occurred, and not as they are recorded on monuments and in chronicles.The abysses of the past opened before the entranced imagination of Gil Gil, revealing to him facts of transcendent importance concerning the fate of man and of empires, disclosing to him the great mystery of the origin of life and the no less great and terrible mystery of the end to which we, wrongly called mortals, are progressing, and causing him, finally, to comprehend, by the light of this sublime philosophy, the laws which preside at the evolution of cosmic matter, and its various manifestations in those ephemeral and transitory forms which are called minerals, plants,animals, stars, constellations, nebula, and worlds. ("The Friend Of The Death")
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
Roberto Bolaño
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Pablo Picasso
...there are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, the help me escape from reality.
Félix J. Palma
He truly was a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Senor Sempere believed we are all a part of something, and that when we leave this world our memories and our desires are not lost, but go on to become the memories and desires of those who take our place. He didn’t know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay. Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain” (p. 348).
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
Salvador Dalí
Beauty should be edible, or not at all.
Salvador Dalí
Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Sometimes, inflexibility creates a callus, scarring over all the bitterness and disappointment improperly, and there is no honest way to break that silence or that infinite distance, not even in death, not even in memory.
Víctor del Árbol
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
Salvador Dalí
God is here. This truth should fill our lives, and every Christmas should be for us a new and special meeting with God, when we allow his light and grace to enter deep into our soul.
Josemaría Escrivá
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The wise have a solid sense of silence and the ability to keep a storehouse of secrets. Their capacity and character are respected.
Baltasar Gracián
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Miguel de Cervantes
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.
George Santayana
I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dalí
You should recognize that man’s soul, this single entity whose powers and parts we have described, may be compared to matter, and that the power of reasoning is its completed form. As long as the soul lies dormant and does not acquire its form from knowledge, then the nature of the soul is useless and exists in vain.
Maimonides
An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.
Andrés Neuman
Let us work as if success depended upon ourselves alone but with heartfelt conviction that we are doing nothing and God everything.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Valour lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
Miguel de Cervantes
All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
All live and die believing that they have known love, thinking it is a common thing, because they confuse it with animal satisfaction; but love is a privilege, love is a lottery of fate, like wealth, like beauty, which only a small minority enjoy....
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on without enquiry and almost at first sight the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.
George Santayana
If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.
Maimonides
Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
What do we teach our children? . . . We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique . . . You may become a Shakespeare a Michelangelo a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.
Pablo Casals
The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake
Mario Vargas Llosa
For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.
Baltasar Gracián
I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
One swallow alone does not make the summer.
Miguel de Cervantes
Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enchantment was lifting, and all I had was painful desire and an indescribable restlessness.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.
Roberto Bolaño
What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novelist’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.
Javier Marías
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
Salvador Dalí
Diligence is the mother of good fortune.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra