Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 15

Where there is no love, put love -- and you will find love.
San Juan de la Cruz
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
In essence , games are the only universally serious activity . They leave no room for skepticism , wouldn't you agree ? However incredulous or doubting you might be , if you want to play , you have no choice but to follow the rules . Only the person who respects the rules , or at least knows and applies them , can win . Reading a book is the same : you have to accept the plot and the characters to enjoy the story .
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…
Roberto Bolaño
‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
Mario Vargas Llosa
From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Reading is more important than writing.
Roberto Bolaño
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There's nothing more difficult than a line.
Pablo Picasso
You must study the Masters but guard the original style that beats within your soul and put to sword those who would try to steal it.
El Greco
On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community.
Salvador de Madariaga
A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid.
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
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
I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.
Juan Miro
New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.
Salvador Dalí
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?
Roberto Bolaño
Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
Salvador Dalí
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
Pablo Picasso
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
Joan Miró
Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.
Pablo Picasso
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dalí
This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
Salvador Dalí
The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
Pablo Picasso
Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.
Pablo Picasso
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." ― Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
Pablo Picasso
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.
Federico García Lorca
People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.
Salvador Dalí
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Pablo Picasso
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
Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
Pablo Picasso
Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..
Pablo Casals
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
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
The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.
Pablo Picasso
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone
Pablo Picasso
When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun
Pablo Picasso
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet, always ready for whatever our lord may wish to work in you. it is certainly a higher virtue of the soul, and a greater grace, to be able to enjoy the Lord in different times and different places than in only one.
Ignatius of Loyola
Songs of the SoulOn a dark night,Inflamed by love-longing -O exquisite risk! -Undetected I slipped away.My house, at last, grown still.Secure in the darkness,I climbed the secret ladder in disguise -O exquisite risk! -Concealed by the darkness.My house, at last, grown still.That sweet night: a secret.Nobody saw me;I did not see a thing.No other light, no other guideThan the one burning in my heart.This light led the wayMore clearly than the risen sunTo where he was waiting for me- The one I knew so intimately -In a place where no one could find us.O night, that guided me!O night, sweeter than sunrise!O night, that joined lover with Beloved!Lover transformed in Beloved!Upon my blossoming breast,Which I cultivated just for him,He drifted into sleep,And while I caressed him,A cedar breeze touched the air.Wind blew down from the tower,Parting the locks of his hair.With his gentle handHe wounded my neckAnd all my senses were suspended.I lost myself. Forgot myself.I lay my face against the Beloved's face.Everything fell away and I left myself behind,Abandoning my caresAmong the lilies, forgotten.
San Juan de la Cruz
This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keepsuch a secret?' My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and itssorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.
José Ortega y Gasset
There is another reason also why the soul has traveled safely in this obscurity; it has suffered: for the way of suffering is safer, and also more profitable, than that of rejoicing and of action. In suffering God gives strength, but in action and in joy the soul does but show its own weakness and imperfections. And in suffering, the soul practices and acquires virtue, and becomes pure, wiser, and more cautious.
San Juan de la Cruz
Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.
José Ortega y Gasset
A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.
Baltasar Gracián
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
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
Pablo Picasso
Remember that there are two kinds of beauty: one of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul displays its radiance in intelligence, in chastity, in good conduct, in generosity, and in good breeding, and all these qualities may exist in an ugly man. And when we focus our attention upon that beauty, not upon the physical, love generally arises with great violence and intensity. I am well aware that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed, and it is enough for a man of worth not to be a monster for him to be dearly loved, provided he has those spiritual endowments I have spoken of.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Beauty should be edible, or not at all.
Salvador Dalí
That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.'It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.
Roberto Bolaño
Every hundred feet the world changes
Roberto Bolaño
The passion of the collector when confronted with a rare item, the enthusiasm of a hunter who sees a fine, handsome beast, can give us no idea of the tremendous love of clothes in some women.
Benito Pérez Galdós
...but once more I say do as you please, for we women are born to this burden of being obedient to our husbands, though they be blockheads
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra