Sourced and curated.

Institutio Oratoria · 95

★ 7.2

I was so free with him as not to mince the matter.

Don Quixote · 1605

★ 6.5

Can we ever have too much of a good thing?

Don Quixote · 1605

★ 6.5

You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.

Don Quixote · 1605

★ 6.4

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

1964

★ 6.2

Essay

Jose Ortega y Gasset

1925

★ 6.1

That's the nature of women... Not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.

Don Quixote · 1605

★ 5.5

Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; "Tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot." Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man even.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 5.5

Interview

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

1945

★ 5.4

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

1964

★ 4.5

The Tragic Sense of Life · 1912

★ 4.3

He's a muddle-headed fool, with frequent lucid intervals.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 4.0

Blessed be he that invented sleep.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 4.0

There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault.

Don Quixote · 1605

★ 3.9

We cannot all be friars, and many are the ways by which God leads his own to eternal life. Knight-errantry is religion.

We give to necessity the praise of virtue.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 3.9

Philosophical literature

Institutio Oratoria · 95

★ 3.8

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.

Epigrams · 103

★ 3.8

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.

Epigrams · 103

★ 3.8

Short story

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

The Dialogue of the Dogs · 1613

★ 3.8

Francisco de Goya

1799

★ 3.8

Autobiography and memoir

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature.

Salvador Dali

1965

★ 3.8

Virtue extends our days: he lives two lives who relives his past with pleasure.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Epigrams · 103

★ 3.7

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

1964

★ 3.7

Essay · Political literature · Philosophical literature

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses · 1930

★ 3.6

Essay · Political literature · Philosophical literature

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses · 1930

★ 3.6

Speech

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Dolores Ibarruri

1936

★ 3.6

Radio broadcast · Speech

They shall not pass.

Dolores Ibarruri

1936

★ 3.6

Play

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is of slight worth, as all life is a dream, and dreams are dreams.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Life is a Dream · 1635

★ 3.5

Essay

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

1913

★ 3.5

Essay

The two luckiest things that can happen to a contemporary painter are, first, to be Spanish and, second, to be named Salvador Dali. Both have happened to me.

1913

★ 3.5

Interview · Magazine

Salvador Dali

1945

★ 3.5

In the end, belief and the lack of it amount to the same thing. If someone were to prove to me-right this minute-that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior.

Luis Bunuel

1982

★ 2.5

The pen is the tongue of the soul.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 2.3

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never led to good intention's goal.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 2.2

There are only two families in the world, as a grandmother of mine used to say: the haves and the have-nots.

For it is feeling and force of imagination that makes us eloquent.

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 2.2

Philosophical literature

Institutio Oratoria · 95

★ 2.1

In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary.

Guide for the Perplexed · 1190

★ 2.1

Astrology is a disease, not a science.

Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites.

1195

★ 2.1

Take me, I am the drug.

Salvador Dali

1970

★ 2.1

Institutio Oratoria · 95

★ 2.0

Wise men don't say, "I shall live to do that". Tomorrow's life's too late; live today.

When love is not madness, it is not love.

Epigrams · 103

★ 2.0

Play

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

1637

★ 2.0

Interview · Magazine

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.

The plate that a peasant eats his soup out of is more interesting to me than the ridiculously rich plates of rich people.

1956

★ 2.0

Interview

Joan Miro

1959

★ 1.9

Cure yourself of the condition of bothering about how you look to other people. Concern yourself only with how you appear to God, with the idea that God has of you.

1905

★ 1.7

Neither fear your death's day nor long for it.

Epigrams · 103

★ 1.3

The foundation of our faith is the belief that God created the Universe from nothing; that time did not exist previously, but was created.

Guide for the Perplexed · 1190

★ 1.3

When I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing then thousand fools-I prefer to address myself to the man.

The blue period was not a question of color. It was an inner necessity to paint like that.

The Guide for the Perplexed · 1190

★ 1.2

Interview · Magazine

1956

★ 1.2

The basic tenets of our Torah and its fundamental principles are thirteen in number: The first fundamental principle is the existence of the Creator. There is a being who exists in the most perfect mode of existence, and he is the cause of he existence of all other beings.

There is no greater glory than love Nor any greater punishment than jealousy.

1168

★ 1.1

Play

Felix Lope de Vega

1632

★ 1.1

Interview

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.