Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works

by Juana Inés de la Cruz

Discursive reason is a sword quite effective at both ends: with the point of the blade it kills; the pommel on the hilt protects.

Knowing how to create subtle, specious reasons is not knowledge; true knowledge consists only in choosing salutary virtue.

Scrutinizing all misfortunes and examining bad omens achieves nothing but the growth of the bad through anticipation.

You occupy the same place whether favored or disdained, complaining if women are cruel and mocking them if they love. You think highly of no woman, no matter how modest: if she rejects you she is ungrateful, and if she accepts, unchaste. Always foolish in your actions, with a measure that is uneven you condemn one for being cruel, another for being easy. Then how can the woman you woo be temperate toward your courting? Ungrateful, she is offended, and if easy, she is irate.

But why are you so alarmed by the guilt you plainly deserve? Love them for what you make them or make them what you can love.

Although, faithful, you display the harshness of your original, the paintbrush has granted to me what love cannot and never could. I live, blissful in the favor that a cold bronze offers to me, for although you show indifference and, at your worst, may say you are unfeeling, never can you declare, that you are not mine.

correcting with forewarned art the inability to grasp in only one intuitive act all of creation, but scaling a ladder, ascends, step by step, and that of comprehending a relative order, following, of necessity, the limited vigor of the understanding that bases its gains on successive discourse; reasoning its progression; doctrine strengthens, with learned nourishment, her feeble forces, and the lengthy, if clement, continuing current of the discipline instills a robust spirit so that boldly she aspires to the glorious laurel of the most arduous striving, and ascends the high rungs, devoting herself first to one then another faculty, until immaterially she looks upon the honorable summit, the sweet conclusion of her arduous zeal

These, then, were the steps I wished at times to take, but at others I forswore that wish, judging it excessive boldness in one who failed to comprehend the smallest, the most simple part of natural effects nearest at hand, to attempt to apprehend everything;

and I almost decided to leave everything in silence, but since this is negative, although it explains a great deal with the emphasis on not explaining, it is necessary to add a brief explanation so that what one wishes the silence to say is understood; if not, the silence will say nothing, because that is its proper occupation: saying nothing.