Quotes

How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation
he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.
- Thorton Wilder, Julius Caesar's journal in The Ides of March (1948)

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how
the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt, excerpt Citizenship in a Republic (1910)

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.
- Robert Kennedy, excerpt address before the U.S. Conference of Mayors (1964)

These are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
- Groucho Marx

A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its boots.
- unknown, (adage's source studied here)

[...] the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.
- Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1782)

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days,
nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address (1961)

If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
-Hillel, 1st century b.C.E. (Pirke Avot)

women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1848)

Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be a great generation. Let your greatness blossom.
- Nelson Mandela

Now it is time to take longer strides.
- John F. Kennedy, Joint Session of Congress (1961)

All good things arrive unto them that wait -- and don't die in the meantime.
- Mark Twain

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

The aim of human rights, if I may borrow a term from engineering, is to move beyond
thinking and talking about the foundations stones - to laying those foundation stones,
inch by inch, together.
- Mary Robinson (seventh President of Ireland 1990-97, and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 1997-2002)

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.
- Nelson Mandela (anti-apartheid activist and President of South Africa 1994-99)

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain

They are full of the wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup - let us call it the teacup - of experience.
- E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey (1907)

Great reforms offend great interests
- Winston Churchill, History of the English Speaking Peoples (Gladstone and Disraeli - Golden Age, 1956)

Maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be
- Dale Wasserman, (Man of La Mancha, 1972)

Sharing the world has never been humanity's defining attribute.
- fictional character Charles Xavier, (X2, 2003, the script has six writers, so I don't know whom I should credit)

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.
- Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
- Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1917)

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
- Voltaire

the Ascetics, who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the gospel, were inspired by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal, and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business, and the pleasures, of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness. [...] They soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised; and the loudest applause was bestowed on this Divine Philosophy, which surpassed without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools.
- Edward Gibbon, Esq., History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 1, Chapter XXXVII, Part I, 1782)

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
- Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck (1973)

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

If you're in trouble or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality.
- J.F. Kennedy's favorite quote (Paraphrasing of part of third canto of Inferno, by Dante Alighieri)

Creyeron que te
mataban con una orden
de ¡fuego!
Creyeron que te
enterraban
Y lo que hacían
era enterrar una semilla.
- Ernesto Cardenal, epitafio para la tumba de Adolfo Báez Bone (1954)

A través de la tierra juntad todos
los silenciosos labios derramados
y desde el fondo habladme toda esta larga noche
como si yo estuviera con vosotros anclado,
contadme todo, cadena a cadena,
eslabón a eslabón, y paso a paso,
afilad los cuchillos que guardasteis,
ponedlos en mi pecho y en mi mano,
como un río de rayos amarillos,
como un río de tigres enterrados,
y dejadme llorar, horas, días, años,
edades ciegas, siglos estelares.

- Pablo Neruda, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1947)

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

I find television very educating; every time somebody turns on the set, I leave the room and read a book.
- Groucho Marx

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)

Es mejor morir de pie que vivir de rodillas.
               - Dolores Ibárruri, España, 1939

          ¿Y será muy deshonroso subsistir sentados?
                       - Felipe, tira de prensa Mafalda (1964-1973), Quino

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

Bigotry and national aversion are powerful magnifiers of every object of dispute
- Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 6, Chapter LX Part 1, 1782)

War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now
by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them
into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.
- Ernest Hemingway, Notes on the Next War (1935)

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
- Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est, Poems (1921)

[...] and the war was preceded, according to the practice of civilized nations, by the most solemn protestations, that each party was sincerely desirous of peace.
- Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 4, Chapter XLI Part 1, 1782)

It isn't enough to talk about peace. Once must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
- Eleanor Roosevelt (1951)

After the first death, there is no other.
- Dylan Thomas (A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, 1945)

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire (Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003)

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses (1842)

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
- Oscar Wilde

If we are to be condemned to a poetry based on buried trains of thought, my dear Pomponius,
we shall soon be at the mercy of the unintelligible parading about among us as a superior mode of sensibility.
- Thorton Wilder, Cicero's letter in The Ides of March (1948)

Society is no comfort to one not sociable.
- William Shakespeare, "Cymbeline", Scene II, character Imogen (1611)

Mafalda and all related characters are Copyright (c) Joaquín Lavado (Quino)

Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' ... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
- Eleanor Roosevelt (1960)

He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the oldest verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1949)

They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
- Dorothy Parker

The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue is to understand.
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses -- bound for dust -- mortal--
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Beautiful and the Damned" (1922)

I've seen things... seen things you little people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... they'll be gone.
- David Peoples, "Blade Runner" (1982)

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, Mountain Interval (1916)

En Santiago de Chile
Los
       días
             son
                  interminablemente
                                               largos:

Varias eternidades en un día.

Nos desplazamos a lomo de luma
Como los vendedores de cochayuyo:
Se bosteza. Se vuelve a bostezar.

Sin embargo las semanas son cortas
Los meses pasan a toda carrera
Ylosañosparecequevolaran.
               - Nicanor Parra, Cronos (1967)

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. :)
- Oscar Wilde

A taste of old Valparaíso...

Lukas Copyright (c) Renzo Pecchenino Lukas, Renzo Techenino

Mis cositas

Excerpts from Bestiario del Reyno de Chile by Lukas

Lukas Copyright (c) Renzo Pecchenino Lukas, Renzo Techenino

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