Machado de Assis famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one â€“ everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made â€“ some even say that is how Nature created her species.
-- Machado de Assis

#Book #Writing #Ideas
He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.
-- Machado de Assis

#Art #Evil #Balance
Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.
-- Machado de Assis

#Men #Thinking #Reeds
I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary â€“ not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.
-- Machado de Assis

#Reality #Two #Opinion
Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next.
-- Machado de Assis

#Generations #Next #Sigh
Do not feel badly if your kindness is rewarded with ingratitude; it is better to fall from your dream clouds than from a third-story window.
-- Machado de Assis

#Dream #Kindness #Fall
It's the occasion that makes the revolution.
-- Machado de Assis

#Revolution #Occasions
A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism.
-- Machado de Assis

#Fighting #Sea #Strive
Tears are not arguments.
-- Machado de Assis

#Political #Tears #Argument
Tomorrow's sun is on it's way - a relentless sun, inscrutable like life.
-- Machado de Assis

#Way #Sun #Tomorrow
There is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.
-- Machado de Assis

#World #Indifference
In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency.
-- Machado de Assis

#Party #Heaven #Ordinary
Por que bonita, se coxa? Por que coxa, se bonita?
-- Machado de Assis
To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores
-- Machado de Assis

#Stars #Sky #Waiting
Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.
-- Machado de Assis

#People #Action #Crime
Dreams disdain fine lines and finishing touches on landscapes â€“ they content themselves with thick but representative brushstrokes.
-- Machado de Assis

#Dream #Finishing #Lines
The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.
-- Machado de Assis

#Two #Noses #Individual

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