...More than once your letters have degenerated into literature, into that piggish literature which is the natural ally to all slaveries and wretchedness. The enslavers know full well that while the slave is singing to liberty he is consoled in his slavery and does not think of breaking his chains. But then I recover my hope and faith in you again when beneath your hurried, improvised, reckless, cacophonous words I perceive the trembling voice gripped by fever... p.19-20It is a grand and terrible thing that the hero should be the only one to see his heroism from the inside, to see into its very vitals, and that everyone else sees it only from the outside, in its external features. It is for this reason that the hero lives alone in the midst of men and that his solitude serves him as comforting company....he will be ready to bear with resignation the misfortune of having his neighbors judge him according to the general law and not the law of God. p.50
There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea-breaker. p.xv
...the most comprehensive, the most all-encompassing formula for tolerance: if you want me to believe you, you believe me. The society of man is cemented with mutual credit. Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you. p.220
Self-interest, of whatever kind, be it disguised as love of glory, the appetite for fortune, position, honors, worldly distinctions, the moment's applause, official commissions and pre-eminences, the search for what others can give us in exchange for real or fancied services or in payment for promises or cajolery, always engenders moral cowardice, and moral cowardice give birth to lies in rabbit fashion. p.223
We were all born to sing--let not the contrary be said. But it is not a question of being born for the purpose. The fact is that whoever was really born in spirit, and not only in the flesh, sings, and sings because he was born in the spirit; if he does not sing, it is because he was born only in the flesh. p.232
The best book on universal history, the most lasting and extensive and comprehensive and true, would be the one which succeeded in recounting, in all their liveliness and depth, the quarrels, intrigues, parochial plots, and gossip that occur in Carbajosa de la Sierra (a village of 300 souls) between the mayor and his wife, the school teacher and his mate, the town clerk and his girl friend on the one hand, and the priest and his housekeeper, Uncle Roque and Aunty Mezuca on the other, each side assisted by a chorus of both sexes. What else was the Trojan War, to which we owe the Iliad? p.233
...Disillusion is the sad aftertaste of triumph. No, that was not it. What you said or did was not worth the applause they granted you....A great dejection takes hold of you. No, that was not it. You did not want to do what you did, you did not want to say what you said; they applauded what was not yours. And your wife appears and, overflowing with tenderness at the sight of you sprawled there, she asks you what is wrong, what ails or worries you, and you send her away, perhaps rudely, with a rough, "Leave me in peace!" And you remain at war with yourself. p.253
They will stone you because they will feel lost at first. They will say: "Liberty? Very well, and what shall I do with that?" A galley-slave friend of mine, whose spiritual chains I dedicated myself to filing through and whose soul I was endeavoring to sow with restlessness and doubt, said to me one day: "See here, just leave me in peace and don't upset me further. I live perfectly well as I am. What do I want with trials and tribulations? Besides, if I didn't believe in Hell, I'd be a criminal." I answered: "No, you would go on being what you are and doing what you are doing and not doing what you do not do. And if this were not the case, and instead you turned to crime, then the fact is that you're a criminal now, too." He rejoined: "I need a reason to be good, an objective foundation upon which to base my conduct. I need to know why a thing my conscience rejects is bad." I countered: "It is bad because your conscience, in which God dwells, rejects it." And he again rejoined: "I have no desire to find myself in the middle of the ocean, like a victim of a shipwreck, drowning and without a plank to cling to." I countered once again: "A plank? I myself am a plank. I don't need any other because the ocean you mention and in which I float is God. Man floats in God without needing any sort of plank....Have you so little confidence in God that though you are in Him, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), you still need a plant to hang on to? He will keep you afloat without any spar or plank." p.295-296
...Those who love me dearly--who are they?They are simply those who want me to be as they wish so they may love me. Love, love, terrible love, which leads us to seek in the beloved for the man we made of him. Who can love me as I am? You, you alone, my Lord, who create me continually out of love, for my very existence is the work of your eternal love. Reader, listen: though I do not know you, I love you so much that if I could hold you in my hands, I would open up your breast and in your heart's core I would make a wound and into it I would rub vinegar and salt, so that you might never again know peace but would live in continual anguish and endless longing. If I have not succeeded indisquieting you with this Quixote of mine it is because of my heavy-handedness, believe me, and because this dead paper on which I write neither shrieks, nor cries out, nor sighs, nor laments, and because language was not made for you and me to understand each other. p.304-305
...without the inner beauty of a free and harmonious life, ham and eau de cologne can become merely forms of barbarism. Without tolerance and broad spiritual understanding, hygiene will only make for clean animals, very clean and very healthy, but also very animal. External riches will merely smother us, if we do not cultivate inner riches. p.371
Have you never, in the corridors of the convent which is Spain, run across people sick with acedia who think they are made of glass and cry out wildly and moan if they are touched? Well, I have met many of them. They seem mad; and yet when you get to talking to them and hear them discourse and reason about their ills, you are convinced that they are the wisest people of all because they sense the common madness and express it, and are the sanest because they sense the common infirmity and bemoan it. p.407
In Spain, erudition tends to mask the fetid sore of moral cowardice that has poisoned our collective soul. In many, it serves as a kind of opium to appease or extinguish longing and anguish; others use it to shirk the necessity of thinking for themselves, limiting themselves to expounding what other men have thought. They pick out a book here and there, extracting sentences and doctrines which they put together and stew, or they spend a year or two or twenty rummaging through files and stacks of papers in some archive or other so that they may announce this or that discovery. The object is to avoid looking into one's own heart and plumbing it, to avoid thinking and, even more, feeling. p. 446
Inasmuch as Cervantes did not dare kill Sancho, still less bury him, many people assume that Sancho never died, and even that he is immortal. When we least expect it, we will see him sally forth, mounted on Rocinante, who did not die either, and he will be wearing his master's armor, cut down to size by the blacksmith at El Toboso. Sancho will take to the road again to continue Don Quixote's glorious work, so that Quixotism may triumph for once and all time on this earth. For let there be no doubt that Sancho, Sancho the good, Sancho the discreet, Sancho the simple, Sancho who went mad beside the deathbed of his master dying sane, Sancho I say, is the man charged by God definitively to establish Quixotism on earth. Thus do I hope and desire, and in this and in God do I trust. And if some reader of this essay should say that it is made up of contrivances and paradoxes, I shall reply that he does not know one iota about matters of Quixotism, and repeat to him what Don Quixote said on a certain occasion to his squire: "Because I know you, Sancho, I pay no attention to what you say." p.463
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