Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 11

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not.
José Ortega y Gasset
We always fall in love with a story, not a name or a body but what is inscribed in the man.
Susana Fortes
Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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
The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.
George Santayana
Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.
Begoña Aretxaga
Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.
Ortega y Gasset
I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.
Javier Marías
Your language looks like a treasure map,' she said, 'if you forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.
Kirmen Uribe
I have no time in the world but the time in which I amand that lasts a moment and passes like a cloud.
Samuel ha-Nagid
Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.
Federico García Lorca
I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.
jaime gil de beidma
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Pablo Picasso
El remanso de airebajo la rama del eco.El remanso del aguabajo fronda de luceros.El remanso de tu bocabajo espesura de besos.*The still waters of the airunder the bough of the echo.The still waters of the waterunder a frond of stars.The still waters of your mouthunder a thicket of k
Federico García Lorca
I.Don't trace out your profile--forget your side view--all that is outer stuff.II.Look for your other halfwho walks always next to youand tends to be who you aren't.
Antonio Machado
The little boy was looking for his voice.(The king of the crickets had it.)In a drop of waterthe little boy was looking for his voice.I do not want it for speaking with;I will make a ring of itso that he may wear my silenceon his little fingerIn a drop of waterthe little boy was looking for his voice.(The captive voice, far away,put on a cricket's clo
Federico García Lorca
Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do.
Félix J. Palma
What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.
Pablo Picasso
Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course, I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently.
Félix J. Palma
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
Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our ears don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late.
Javier Marías
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.
José Ortega y Gasset
Later, Aldapuerta spent two years at medical school where he learned the geography of the human body and something of its almost infinite capacity for suffering anddegradation. He took especial delight in tending to the physically incapacitated and wasthankful for the loose coats that “prevented the matrona from spotting the engorged cock that I would occasionally press against the bedridden patient”.
Jesus I. Aldapuerta
Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.
Manel Loureiro
Arguably, horror may be understood as a fictional indulgence in fantasies of violence, and our fascination with it seen as a form of sublimation of repressed desires. If we accept this line of thinking, then horror has the benefit of, at least, being one of the most honest of genres.
Xavier Aldana Reyes
I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.
Sergio Aragonés
…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness.
José Ortega y Gasset
Everyone is operating and running their lives at their current level of conscious awareness.
Carlos Marin
Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
Baltasar Gracián
I don't have any relationship with God and I've never wanted it. I don't believe in fate or in any superior entity; if a plane crashes and people die, it's not because Heaven said so.
Fernando Alonso Díaz
No matter how much individuals do through their own efforts, they cannot actively purify themselves enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge them in that fire that is dark for them, as we will explain.
San Juan de la Cruz
I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn't manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?
Félix J. Palma
The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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
While the burning fish is tracing his arcnear the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all,and the blind boy flies away in the white stone,and the ivory poem of the green cicadabeats and reverberates in the elm,let us give honor to the Lord—the black mark of his good hand—who has arranged for silence in all this noise.tHonor to the god of distance and of absence,ff the anchor in the sea—the open sea…He frees us from the world—it’s everywhere—he opens roads for us to walk on.tWith our cup of darkness filled to the brim,with our heart that always knows some hunger,let us give honor to the Lord who created the zeroand carved our thought out of the block of faith.
Antonio Machado
Bound, elbow to elbow, darkness and night entered the dwelling.
Luis Buñuel
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
Adelina knew perfectly well who the father was, but she worked hard to forget it, and by the end of her life she would insist that Jesús was her child and hers only.
Olga Núñez Miret
In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.
Roberto Bolaño
Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
... it's a bad sign when someone drinks a lot and doesn't laugh.
Andrés Neuman
Cautious silence is the refuge of good sense
Baltasar Gracián
For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.
Baltasar Gracián
What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn't pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it's as if he didn't. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion. And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I've chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact.
Luis Buñuel
In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It's the place of reflection and contemplation, and it's the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.
Ángeles Arrien
You can make a text mean anything, especially if it’s old and full of ambiguities.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Like an abandoned dog who cannot finda smell or a track and roamsalong the roads, with no road, likethe child who in a night of the fairgets lost among the crowd,and the air is dusty, and the candlesfluttering,--astounded, his heartweighed down by music and by pain;that’s how I am, drunk, sad by nature,a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet,and an ordinary man lost in dreams,searching constantly for God among the mists.
Antonio Machado
We all have to lead our own life, and we only have the one life, and the only people who can live life not according to their own desires are those who have no desires--which is the majority, actually. People can say what they like, they can speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance, and resignation, but it's all false. The norm is for people to think that they desire whatever comes to them, whatever they achieve along the way or whatever is given to them--they have no preconceived desires.
Javier Marías
He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well.
Baltasar Gracián
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
Federico García Lorca
The greatness of the enterprise does not always ensure success, but at least ensures glory.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
If God causes you to suffer much, it is a sign that He has great designs for you, and that He certainly intends to make you a saint. And if you wish to become a great saint, entreat Him yourself to give you much opportunity for suffering; for there is no wood better to kindle the fire of holy love than the wood of the cross, which Christ used for His own great sacrifice of boundless charity.
Ignatius of Loyola
Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.
Roberto Bolaño
Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.
Fernán Caballero