Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 2

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.
George Santayana
To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and furthermore it is to act as if He did exist.
Miguel de Unamuno
Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water."~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra ~
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
José Ortega y Gasset
Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
The more we reduce the size of our world the more we shall be its master.
Jacinto Benavente
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I think of the memory as being rather like a dam," he said, after a pause for thought. "It irrigates and gives life to our whole spirit. But, like a dam, it needs overflow channels if it's not to burst its banks. Because if it ever does overflow or burst, its waters will destroy everything in its path.
Bernardo Atxaga
The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sermons seldom convert sinners they sometimes goad them into more sin.
Salvador de Madariaga
Everyone is operating and running their lives at their current level of conscious awareness.
Carlos Marin
Consciousness is a born hermit.
George Santayana
If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?
Felix Alba-Juez
We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Every morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday--the balance of power--that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us.
Javier Marías
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
Pablo Picasso
What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
Pablo Picasso
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
I just came this morning and haven't been debriefed yet about the status of our latest prisoners. As a matter of fact, I'd barely stepped inside,
Elle Aycart
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
José Ortega y Gasset
She'd never tolerated deception regarding her strong opinions--that much was true. But wasn't it also true that when it came to trying to please in matters that weren't crucial to her, that didn't compromise her sense of things, she had been dishonest?
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera
You Who'd be Wise" from "Ben Mishle" written sometime between 1013 and 1050 C.E.You who'd be wiseshould inquire into the nature of justice and evilfrom your teachers,seekers like yourself, and the studentswho question your answer.
Shmuel HaNagid
I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.
Juan Miro
To believe in nothing is as ridiculous as to believe in everything. Reason and factual evidence may convert a belief into knowledge.
Felix Alba-Juez
The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint. These goods consists of machines, tools, computers, buildings, semi-manufactured goods, software, etc., and they exist due to prior savings of the nation's citizens. In other words, comparatively rich societies possess more wealth because they have more time accumulated in the form of capital goods, which places them closer in time to the achievement of much more valuable goals.
Jesús Huerta de Soto
I can tell where my own shoe pinches me.
Miguel de Cervantes
He who sings frightens away his ills.
Miguel de Cervantes
Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
Mario Vargas Llosa
I dreamt -- marvellous error! -- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.
Antonio Machado
The best skill at cards is knowing when to discard.
Baltasar Gracián
His eyes, green with yellow sparks, and with elongated pupils like a cat’s, made his grandmother gasp and say: ‘Jesus! He has the devil’s eyes!
Olga Núñez Miret
The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.
Roberto Bolaño
Nothing is ever behind us.
Roberto Bolaño
One of the best ways to attract capital is to outperform the competition.
Alejandro Cremades
And why have you burnt our Gods, when others are brought from other Regions by the Spaniards? Are the Gods of other Provinces more sacred than ours?
Bartolomé de las Casas
Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.
Manuel Rivas
Sometimes destiny switches the cards on you so that while you're busy escaping from the dog, you find yourself facing the wolf
Susana Fortes
Ne'er look for the birds of this year in the nests of the last.
Miguel de Cervantes
My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.
Salvador Dalí
His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.
Roberto Bolaño
Every one is as God made him and oftentimes a good deal worse.
Cervantes
Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre
Pedro Almodóvar
Reading was artificial borrowed life, benefiting from ideas and sensations transmitted cerebrally, acquiring the treasures of human truth by purchase or swindle, not by work.
Benito Pérez Galdós
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.
Felipe Alfau
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
Salvador de Madariaga
Throughout my career nervousness and stage-fright have never left me before playing. And each of the thousands of concerts I have played at I feel as bad as I did the very first time.
Pablo Casals
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The idea here is simple, if you can dream it, it is possible.
Ernest Riveras Tobia
Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.
San Juan de la Cruz
Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
Miguel de Unamuno
Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
José Ortega y Gasset
Honesty is the best policy.
Miguel de Cervantes
To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime has no experience of its own limits. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority could only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself. He would then have learned this fundamental discipline: "Here I end and here begins another more powerful than I am. In the world, apparently, there are two people: I myself and another superior to me.
Ortega y Gasset
Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.
Roberto Bolaño