Machado de Assis > Quotes

“To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them.”
― Joaquim Maria 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, Iaiá Garcia

“Marcela amou-me durante quinze meses e onze contos de réis”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Ao verme que primeiro roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver dedico como saudosa lembrança estas memórias póstumas”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Mas a saudade é isto mesmo; é o passar e repassar das memórias antigas”
― Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro

“Este último capítulo é todo de negativas. Não alcancei a celebridade do emplasto, não fui ministro, não fui califa, não conheci o casamento. Verdade é que, ao lado dessas faltas, coube-me a boa fortuna de não comprar o pão com o suor do meu rosto. Mais; não padeci a morte de D. Plácida, nem a semidemência do Quincas Borba. Somadas umas coisas e outras, qualquer pessoa imaginará que não houve míngua nem sobra, e conseguintemente que saí quite com a vida. E imaginará mal; porque ao chegar a este outro lado do mistério, achei-me com um pequeno saldo, que é a derradeira negativa deste capítulo de negativas: — Não tive filhos, não transmiti a nenhuma criatura o legado da nossa miséria.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Matamos o tempo, o tempo nos enterra.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“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”
― Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Devil's Church and Other Stories

“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, Dom Casmurro

“Ao vencedor, as batatas.”
― Machado de Assis, Quincas Borba

“A loucura, objeto dos meus estudos, era até agora uma ilha perdida no oceano da razão; começo a suspeitar que é um continente.”
― Machado de Assis, O Alienista

“Em nosso país a vulgaridade é um título, a mediocridade um brasão.”
― 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, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“O Diabo, invejoso, fez o homem confundir fé com religião e amor com casamento.”
― Machado de Assis

“Cada qual sabe amar a seu modo; o modo, pouco importa; o essencial é que saiba amar.”
― Machado de Assis

“(...) preferi dormir, que é um modo interino de morrer.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Por que bonita, se coxa? Por que coxa, se bonita?”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“O mais feroz dos animais domésticos é o relógio de parede. Conheço um que já devorou três gerações da minha família.”
― 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, Dom Casmurro

“Purifica o teu coração antes de permitires que o amor entre nele, pois até o mel mais doce azeda num recipiente sujo.”
― Machado de Assis, Contos

“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, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“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.”
― Machado de Assis

“Não tive filhos, não transmiti a nenhuma criatura o legado da nossa miséria.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“É melhor cair das nuvens que de um segundo andar”
― Machado de Assis

“Não te irrites se te pagarem mal um benefício: antes cair das nuvens, que de um terceiro andar.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Cada estação da vida é uma edição, que corrige a anterior, e que será corrigida também, até a edição definitiva, que o editor dá de graça aos vermes.”
― Machado de Assis

“Then I said to myself, "If the centuries are going by, mine will come too, and will pass, and after a time the last century of all will come, and then I shall understand." And I fixed my eyes on the ages that were coming and passing on; now I was calm and resolute, maybe even happy. Each age brought its share of light and shade, of apathy and struggle, of truth and error, and its parade of systems, of new ideas, of new illusions; in each of them the verdure of spring burst forth, grew yellow with age, and then, young once more, burst forth again. While life thus moved with the regularity of a calendar, history and civilization developed; and man, at first naked and unarmed, clothed and armed himself, built hut and palace, villages and hundred-gated Thebes, created science that scrutinizes and art that elevates, made himself an orator, a mechanic, a philosopher, ran all over the face of the globe, went down into the earth and up to the clouds, performing the mysterious work through which he satisfied the necessities of life and tried to forget his loneliness. My tired eyes finally saw the present age go by end, after it, future ages. The present age, as it approached, was agile, skillful, vibrant, proud, a little verbose, audacious, learned, but in the end it was as miserable as the earlier ones. And so it passed, and so passed the others, with the same speed and monotony.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Deus, para a felicidade do homem, inventou a fé e o amor. O Diabo, invejoso, fez o homem confundir fé com religião e amor com casamento.”
― Machado de Assis, Ressurreição

“Eu sei que vossa excelência preferia uma delicada mentira; mas eu não conheço nada mais delicado que a verdade.”
― Machado de Assis, Contos Fluminenses

“Nada tenho que ver com a ciência; mas, se tantos homens em quem supomos juízo são reclusos por dementes, quem nos afirma que o alienado não é o alienista?”
― Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, O Alienista