Jose Bergamin Quotes

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

To be ready to fail is to be prepared for success.

Pride in a man is confused with dignity; in a woman, with self-love.

Sensuality without love is a sin; love without sensuality is worse than a sin.

Effort and result are never simultaneous. In art, only the result counts.

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime.

To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer.

Who learns most from a good book is the author.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

You can hesitate before deciding, but not once the decision is made.

Happiness is always a coincidence.

You can say the opposite of something you've said but you can't do the opposite of something you've done.

Drinking spirits cannot cause spiritual damage.

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.

To sin offers repentance and forgiveness; not to sin offers only punishment.

The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

There are no good or bad habits. All habits are, by definition, bad.

Better than succeeding little by little is failing at one go.

Do we have to talk in order to agree or agree in order to talk?

The first condition for making music is not to make a noise.

Theology is the logic of the Devil.

True solidarity is only possible among the solitary.

To be thirsty and to drink water is the perfection of sensuality rarely achieved. Sometimes you drink water; other times you are thirsty.

Only one thing has to matter for everything to matter.

A piece of advice always contains an implicit threat, just as a threat always contains an implicit piece of advice.

The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.

In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.

If you really believe music is dangerous, you should let it go in one ear and out the other.

Ignorance is learned; innocence is forgotten.

To be young is to live in the hope of escaping youth; to be old, in the despair of having succeeded.

A rocket is an experiment; a star is an observation.

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.

Skepticism is provisional, even if it lasts a lifetime.

Life is a dangerous adventure, says the American, and he is half right: life is dangerous, but it's not an adventure.

All true tradition usually appears revolutionary.

What is reasoned has nothing to do with what is reasonable.

When I listen to the engine of my car, I might say it sounds fine, but it would not occur to me to say "What lovely music!

When you are listening to music it is better to cover your eyes than your ears.

The quality of a man's mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket.

A rocket is a reed that thinks brilliantly.

We say of an animal that it is intelligent, and we say the same thing of a woman; but in neither case is it usually appropriate, clearly for very different reasons.

True art tries not to attract attention in order to be noticed.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

In love, it is the weak who strike and the strong who caress.

When the English have scored a goal, they think nothing more remains to be done.

You need to have a God, a lover, and an enemy, says the poet. Exactly: you need to have three enemies.

The barometer that shows "variable" is an ironic indictment of God.