Quotes by Spanish Authors

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.
Pablo Picasso
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sleep is the best cure for waking troubles.
Miguel de Cervantes
Faith which does not doubt is dead faith. -Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher and writer (1864-1936)
Miguel de Unamuno
Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime has no experience of its own limits. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority could only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself. He would then have learned this fundamental discipline: "Here I end and here begins another more powerful than I am. In the world, apparently, there are two people: I myself and another superior to me.
Ortega y Gasset
Fear? There is no fear when you ride a MotoGP bike. If there is fear, you don't enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it, you'd better stay at home.
Álvaro Bautista Arce
What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.
Ignatius of Loyola
Enduring means accepting. Accepting things as they are and not as you would wish them to be, and then looking ahead, not behind.
Rafael Nadal
If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy.
Ignatius of Loyola
Here is the devil-and-all to pay.
Miguel de Cervantes
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
Joan Miró
Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.
Ortega y Gasset
All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
You can make a text mean anything, especially if it’s old and full of ambiguities.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
While the burning fish is tracing his arcnear the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all,and the blind boy flies away in the white stone,and the ivory poem of the green cicadabeats and reverberates in the elm,let us give honor to the Lord—the black mark of his good hand—who has arranged for silence in all this noise.tHonor to the god of distance and of absence,ff the anchor in the sea—the open sea…He frees us from the world—it’s everywhere—he opens roads for us to walk on.tWith our cup of darkness filled to the brim,with our heart that always knows some hunger,let us give honor to the Lord who created the zeroand carved our thought out of the block of faith.
Antonio Machado
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.
Núria Añó
There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do.
Félix J. Palma
Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.
Mario Vargas Llosa
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.
Mario Vargas Llosa
We have eyelids but not earlids, for the ears are the portals of learning, and Nature wanted to keep them wide open.
Baltasar Gracián
When those who name dead people have gone, there just remains the calmness of foreign cemeteries, in which nothing appears familiar and nothing frightens you.
Ray Loriga
People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.
Javier Marías
In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
Salvador Dalí
When love is not madness it is not love.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide.
Ortega y Gasset
A confused labyrinth of smoky starsentangles my hopes,which are nearly faded
Federico García Lorca
God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
Pablo Picasso
Man appoints and God disappoints.
Cervantes
He who is jealous, is never jealous of what you see, with what is imagined is enough.
Jacinto Benavente
Un paraíso conseguido sin esfuerzo no entusiasma al creyente.
Pío Baroja
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.
Roberto Bolaño
You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It isn’t true, is it, Daniel, that music can tame the beasts? Yet, in the end, a song lives.
Maria Àngels Anglada
Modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.
Beatriz Colomina
I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Consciousness is a born hermit.
George Santayana
You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.
Miguel de Unamuno
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.
George Santayana
However great your dedication, you never win anything on your own
Rafael Nadal
His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!
Roberto Bolaño
A prudent man will think more important what fate has conceded to him than what it has denied.
Baltasar Gracián
... the novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
Roberto Bolaño
The earth has its music for those who will listen.
George Santayana
We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
Mario Vargas Llosa
...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I am fascinated by the dailies, what is daily.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
I have no sense of humor about losing
Rafael Nadal
No matter where we come from, a little sugar is what everybody demands in life, what everybody needs in life. It's perhaps the main ingredient that keeps us alive.
Merce Cardus