José Martí
91 quotes
Biography
José Julián Martí Pérez was a Cuban nationalist, poet, philosopher, essayist, journalist, translator, professor, and publisher, who is considered a Cuban national hero because of his role in the liberation of his country from Spain. He was also an important figure in Latin American literature.
"The first duty of a man is to think for himself"
"We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it."
"A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel."
"But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove."
"A grain of poetry suffices to season a century."
"Life on earth is a hand-to-hand mortal combat... between the law of love and the law of hate."
"Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation!"
"Oh, what company good poets are!"
"A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them."
"To beautify life is to give it an object."
"Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them. Griefs purify and prepare him."
"Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests."
"A nation is not a complex of wheels, nor a wild horse race, but a stride upward concerted by real men."
"Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it."
"Hatred, slavery's inevitable aftermath."
"Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas."
"Man needs to go outside himself in order to find repose and reveal himself."
"Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him."
"The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country."
"The whole afternoon was spent rejoicing as the demonstration spread across the city; no one walked alone for all San Juan was a single family."
"Many houses were still full of light when, at the close of March 22, the people of the Círculo returned to their homes, which were gladdened with a fleeting gladness by an hour of justice — for there are still many slaves, black and white, in Puerto Rico!"
"Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy."
"This is the age in which hills can look down upon the mountains."
"Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro."
"I have lived in the monster and I know its insides; and my sling is the sling of David."