José Martí: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.”

“Books console us, calm us, prepare us, enrich us and redeem us.”

“Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.”

“Life on earth is a hand-to-hand mortal combat… between the law of love and the law of hate.”

“Government must originate in the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements.”

“Once I reveled in a destiny
like no other joy I'd known:
when the warden — reading
my death sentence — wept.”

“Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.”

“It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed, in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors.”

“Oh, what company good poets are!”

“It is necessary to make virtue fashionable.”

“In Cuba, there is no fear of a racial war. Men are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. Cubans are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. On the field of battle, dying for Cuba, the souls of whites and Negroes have risen together into the air.”

“He who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.”

“Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice. If they knew its charms, the dignity that accompanies it, how much a free man feels like a king, the perpetual inner light that is produced by decorous self-awareness and realization, perhaps there would be no greater friends of freedom than those who are its worst enemies.”

“Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro.”

“To govern well, one must see things as they are.”

“Every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo.”

“The merit and strength of a people are measured by their enthusiasm for freedom when the only rewards from it are anguish and martyrdom, the blood and ashes of exile, the sorrow of a house driven by the waves, and the shame of a useless life that lacks the foundation and peace of mind needed to do one's share of the common task.”

“This is the age in which hills can look down upon the mountains.”

“Knowing is what counts. To know one's country and govern it with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny.”