Luis > Luis's Quotes

“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre; por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida, y, por el contrario, el cautiverio es el mayor mal que puede venir a los hombres.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
sombra, que me llevare el blanco día”
― Quevedo

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
― Octavio Paz

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
― Mark Twain

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.”
― Plato, Apology

“I don't believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and everything that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Committing himself to the freelance’s life he lived at the edge of poverty, a southerner he stood outside of the literary establishment of new England. Poe’s pale expression in his most famous photo shows a man who believed he was born to suffer. If circumstances in his life were not propitious to suffering, he made sure to change them until they were, deep in his understanding almost as to be unconscious was a respect for the driving power of his misery. That it could take manifold forms in ways that he didn’t have to be aware of as if not he, but it could create. “ E.L. Doctorow on Edgar Allan Poe”
― E.L. Doctorow, Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006

“In men the nature of the genital organs is disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that is deaf to reason, and it attempts to dominate all because of its frenzied lusts.”
― Plato

“Cuando han pasado muchos años, o incluso no tantos, la gente se cuenta los hechos como le conviene y llega a creerse su propia versión, su distorsión.”
― Javier Marías, Así empieza lo malo

“Los vínculos del engaño y la desdicha son los más fuertes de todos." Javier Marias - Asi empieza lo malo”
― Javier Marías, Así empieza lo malo

“...We experience rather than articulate the result...We're always rationally explaining and articulating things, but we are at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs or doesn't in that instant, what we turn to art form is precisely this moment when we know something, we feel it but we can't articulate because it's too complex and multiple. But the knowing in such moments is real, I say this is what art is for, to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it's superior to our usual, conceptual, reductive way." A swim in a pond in the rain by George Saunders.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Your "best"! Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
― Sean Connery

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
― Novalis

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”
― Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

“Los hombres tenemos la capacidad de meter miedo a las mujeres con una mera inflexión de la voz o una frase amenazadora y fría, nuestras manos son más fuertes y aprietan desde hace siglos.”
― Javier Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can fall to the lot of man.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Advertir que alguien quiere vincularse a nosotros sexualmente nos obliga a considerarlo,”
― Javier Marías, Así empieza lo malo