Best 32 quotes of Machado De Assis on MyQuotes

A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism.

A vida sem luta é um mar morto no centro do organismo universal.

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.

Dreams disdain fine lines and finishing touches on landscapes – they content themselves with thick but representative brushstrokes.

I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.

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.

In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.

It's the occasion that makes the revolution.

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.

Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next.

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

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.

There is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.

There is nothing worse than giving the longest of legs to the smallest of ideas.

To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores

Tomorrow's sun is on it's way - a relentless sun, inscrutable like life.

Capitu, apesar daqueles olhos que o diabo lhe deu... Você já reparou nos olhos dela? São assim de cigana oblíqua e dissimulada. Pois apesar deles, poderia passar, se não fosse a vaidade e a adulação. Oh! A adulação!

Eu sei que vossa excelência preferia uma delicada mentira; mas eu não conheço nada mais delicado que a verdade.

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Los locos de amor eran tres o cuatro, pero sólo les resultaban asombrosos por la curiosa índole de su delirio.

Mas a saudade é isto mesmo; é o passar e repassar das memórias antigas

Não podia tirar os olhos daquela criatura de quatorze anos, alta, forte e cheia, apertada em um vestido de chita, meio desbotado. Os cabelos grossos, feitos em duas tranças, com as pontas atadas uma à outra, à moda do tempo, desciam-lhe pelas costas. Morena, olhos claros e grandes, nariz reto e comprido, tinha a boca fina e o queixo largo. As mãos, a despeito de alguns ofícios rudes, eram curadas com amor, não cheiravam a sabões finos nem águas de toucador, mas com água do poço e sabão comum trazia-as sem mácula. Calçava sapatos de duraque, rasos e velhos, a que ela mesma dera alguns pontos.

O Diabo, invejoso, fez o homem confundir fé com religião e amor com casamento.

...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.

Se os mortos vão depressa, os velhos ainda vão mais depressa que os mortos... Viva a mocidade!

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.

Veio a questão do título. Pestana, quando compôs a primeira polca, em 1871, quis dar-lhe um título poético, escolheu este: Pingos de Sol. O editor abanou a cabeça, e disse-lhe que os títulos deviam ser, já de si, destinados à popularidade – ou por alusão a algum sucesso do dia, ou pela graça das palavras; indicou-lhe dois: A lei de 28 de setembro, ou Candongas não fazem festa. – Mas que quer dizer Candongas não fazem festa? – perguntou o autor. – Não quer dizer nada, mas populariza-se logo.

,,,we forget our good actions only slowly, and in fact never truly forget them.