José Rizal: Likeness

José Rizal was Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

José Rizal: 128 quotes51 likes

“Fate presented itself to some like a chinese fan--one side black, the other side gilded with flowers.”

Noli me Tangere

“Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all.”

Toast to the artists Juan Luna and Felix Hidalgo: Madrid, Spain (25 June 1884)

“Believing in accidents is like believing in miracles--both presuppose that God does not know the future.”

Noli me Tangere

“…Does your Excellency know the spirit of (my) country? If you did, you would not say that I am "a spirit twisted by a German education," for the spirit that animates me I already had since childhood, before I learned a word of German. My spirit is "twisted" because I have been reared among injustices and abuses which I saw everywhere, because since a child I have seen many suffer stupidly and because I also have suffered. My "twisted spirit" is the product of that constant vision of the moral ideal that succumbs before the powerful reality of abuses, arbitrariness, hypocrisies, farces, violence, perfidies and other base passions. And "twisted" like my spirit is that of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have not yet left their miserable homes, who speak no other language except their own, and who, if they could write or express their thoughts, would make my Noli me tangere very tiny indeed, and with their volumes there would be enough to build pyramids for the corpses of all the tyrants…”

Open letter to Barrantes on the Noli, published in La Solidaridad (15 February 1890)

“He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains…but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return”

"Los Viajes" in La Solidaridad (15 May 1889)- translated from the Spanish by Nick Joaquin

“; It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted in the field without becoming part of an edifice.”

José Rizal book El Filibusterismo

El Filibusterismo