Jose Bergamin quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

Even if you're not going anywhere, don't get in the way.

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

True solidarity is only possible among the solitary.

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

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

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

When there is nothing to fear is the time to begin fearing everything.

Happiness is always a coincidence.

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. -Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)

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

A reformer knows neither how to do nor to undo.

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

Who learns most from a good book is the author.

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

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

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

An ignorance of Marx is as frequent among Marxists as an ignorance of Christ is among Catholics.

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.

Man is a question; woman is an answer. The mistake women make today is to offer themselves as answers before being questioned.

Only one thing has to matter for everything to matter.

Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them.

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

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

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.

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

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

Skepticism is provisional, even if it lasts a lifetime.

A rocket is a reed that thinks brilliantly.

Ignorance is learned; innocence is forgotten.

Drinking spirits cannot cause spiritual damage.

Art is good but it isn't the best.

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

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

Those who are scandalized by a naked body--thinks the Devil--are easy prey: they are already doomed.

All true tradition usually appears revolutionary.

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

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

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

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

I fear only that which I love, says man, according to Montaigne. Woman replies: I love only that which I fear.

Morality measured in centimeters: all mothers believe that only their daughters dance decently.

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

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

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

Theology is the logic of the Devil.

The only time a man thinks is when he's alone.

The man who spends all his time looking up to heaven is not always the best; in fact, he is usually the worst.

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

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