Machado De Assis Quotes & Sayings

He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else. — Machado De Assis

Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms. — Machado De Assis

He discriminated against neither the avaricious nor the prodigal: both were committed to the asylum; this led people to say that the alienist's concept of madness included practically everybody. — Machado De Assis

We kill time; time buries us. — Machado De Assis

Each person is worth the value put on them by the affection of others, and that is where popular wisdom has found that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. — Machado De Assis

A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism. — Machado De Assis

There is nothing worse than giving the longest of legs to the smallest of ideas. — Machado De Assis

Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent. — Machado De Assis

It's the occasion that makes the revolution. — Machado De Assis

In hoc signo vinces — Machado De Assis

Love, my lads! And above all, love pretty, charming girls; they are the remedy for evil, they give a sweet smell to rottenness, they exchange life for death ... Love, my lads! — Machado De Assis

He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil. — Machado De Assis

In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency. — Machado De Assis

Nothing could have been more imprudent or more natural than this reply. It reflected the ecstasy inspired by great crises. — Machado De Assis

Bacamarte evidenced neither vanity nor modesty; he listened in silence, as impassive as a stone god. — Machado De Assis

,,,we forget our good actions only slowly, and in fact never truly forget them. — Machado De Assis

Do not feel badly if your kindness is rewarded with ingratitude; it is better to fall from your dream clouds than from a third-story window. — Machado De Assis

He sucked the chicken wing philosophically. — Machado De Assis

A man's eye serves as a photography to the invisible, as well as his ear serves as echo to the silence. — Machado De Assis

Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next. — Machado De Assis

Tears are not arguments. — Machado De Assis

A future priest, I faced her as before an altar: one of her cheeks was the Epistle and the other the Gospel. Her mouth might have been the chalice, her lips the paten. All I needed to do was to say a new mass, according to a Latin that no one learns at school, and is the catholic language of mankind. Don't think me sacrilegious, devout lady reader; the purity of the intention cleanses anything unorthodox in the style. We stood there with heaven within us. Our hands, their nerve ends touching, made two creatures one: a single, seraphic being. Our eyes went on saying infinite things, and the words did not even try to pass our lips: they went back to the heart as silently as they had come ... — Machado De Assis

Prometheus. The truth unknown to man is the madness of him who proclaims it. Proceed, and have done. — Machado De Assis

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall ...
And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry. — Machado De Assis

His eyes, blind to external reality but highly perceptive in the realm of the inner life, rose from the book to the ceiling and returned to the book. — Machado De Assis

One of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth. — Machado De Assis

The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium. — Machado De Assis

Imagine a man between thirty-eight and forty, tall, slim, and pale. His clothes, except for their style, looked as if they'd escaped from the Babylonian captivity. The hat was a contemporary of one of Gessler's. Imagine now a frock coat broader than the needs of his frame
or, literally, that person's bones. The fringe had disappeared some time ago, of the eight original buttons, three were left. The brown drill trousers had two strong knee patches, while the cuffs had been chewed by the heels of boots that bore no pity or polish. About his neck the ends of a tie of two faded colors floated, gripping a week-old collar. I think he was also wearing a dark silk vest, torn in places and unbuttoned.
"I'll bet you don't know me, my good Dr. Cubas," he said.
"I can't recall ... "
"I'm Borba, Quincas Borba. — Machado De Assis

Lovers' language, give me an exact and poetic comparison to say what those eyes of Capitu were like. No image comes to mind that doesn't offend against the rules of good style, to say what they were and what they did to me. Undertow eyes? Why not? Undertow. That's the notion that the new expression put in my head. They held some kind of mysterious, active fluid, a force that dragged one in, like the undertow of a wave retreating from the shore on stormy days. So as not to be dragged in, I held onto anything around them, her ears, her arms, her hair spread about her shoulders; but as soon as I returned to the pupils of her eyes again, the wave emerging from them grew towards me, deep and dark, threatening to envelop me, draw me in and swallow me up. — Machado De Assis

Observe now with what skill, with what art, I make the biggest transition in this book. Observe: my delirium began in the presence of Virgilia; Virigilia was the great sin of my youth; there is no youth without childhood; childhood presupposes birth; and so we arrive, effortlessly, at October 20, 1805, the date of my birth. — Machado De Assis

Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them. — Machado De Assis

To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. — Machado De Assis

He had found in himself the perfect, undeniable case of insanity. He possessed wisdom, patience, tolerance, truthfulness, loyalty, and moral fortitude - all the qualities that go to make an utter madman. — Machado De Assis

There he is, bent over the page, with a monocle in his right eye, wholly devoted to the noble but rugged task of ferreting out the error. He has already promised himself to write a little monograph in which he will relate the finding of the book and the discovery of the error, if there really is one hidden there. In the end, he discovers nothing and contents himself with possession of the book. He closes it, gazes at it, gazes at it again, goes to the window and holds it in the sun. The only copy! At this moment a Caesar or a Cromwell passes beneath his window, on the road to power and glory. He turns his back, closes the window, stretches in his hammock, and fingers the leaves of the book slowly, lovingly, tasting it sip by sip ... An only copy! — Machado De Assis