Philosophers From Cuba

"Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation!"

"Oh, what company good poets are!"

"A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them."

"To beautify life is to give it an object."

"Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them. Griefs purify and prepare him."

"Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests."

"A nation is not a complex of wheels, nor a wild horse race, but a stride upward concerted by real men."

"Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it."

"A grain of poetry suffices to season a century."

"Hatred, slavery's inevitable aftermath."

"Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas."

"Man needs to go outside himself in order to find repose and reveal himself."

"Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him."

"The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country."

"The whole afternoon was spent rejoicing as the demonstration spread across the city; no one walked alone for all San Juan was a single family."

"Many houses were still full of light when, at the close of March 22, the people of the Círculo returned to their homes, which were gladdened with a fleeting gladness by an hour of justice — for there are still many slaves, black and white, in Puerto Rico!"

"Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy."

"Yo quiero salir del mundo por la puerta natural: en un carro de hojas verdes a morir me han de llevar. No me pongan en lo oscuro a morir como un traidor: yo soy bueno, y como bueno moriré de cara al sol."

"This is the age in which hills can look down upon the mountains."

"Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro."

"I have lived in the monster and I know its insides; and my sling is the sling of David."

"Rights are to be taken, not requested; seized, not begged for."

"La patria es ara, no pedestal."

"Day and night I always dream with open eyes."

"Cuba and Belgium are both countries of modest size, surrounded by large, powerful and often hostile powers."

"The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that he can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds."

"Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones. There is no prow that can cut through a cloudbank of ideas. A powerful idea, waved before the world at the proper time, can stop a squadron of iron-clad ships, like the mystical flag of the Last judgement."

"The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing! It is the time of mobilization, of marching together, and we must go forward in close ranks, like silver in the veins of the Andes."

"To govern well, one must see things as they are."

"Government must originate in the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements."

"In nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the uncultured will govern because it is their habit to attack and resolve doubts with their fists in cases where the cultured have failed in the art of governing. The uncultured masses are lazy and timid in the realm of intelligence, and they want to be governed well. But if the government hurts them, they shake it off and govern themselves."

"En el periódico, en la cátedra, en la academia, debe llevarse adelante el estudio de los factores reales del país. Conocerlos basta, sin vendas ni ambages; porque el que pone de lado, por voluntad u olvido, una parte de la verdad, cae a la larga por la verdad que le faltó, que crece en la negligencia, y derriba lo que se levanta sin ella. Resolver el problema después de conocer sus elementos, es más fácil que resolver el problema sin conocerlos."

"Knowing is what counts. To know one's country and govern it with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny."

"Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be our own. And let the vanquished pedant hold his tongue, for there are no lands in which a man may take greater pride than in our long-suffering American republics."

"America began to suffer, and still suffers, from the tiresome task of reconciling the hostile and discordant elements it inherited from the despotic and perverse colonizer, and the imported methods and ideas which have been retarding logical government because they are lacking in local realities. Thrown out of gear for three centuries by a power which denied men the right to use their reason, the continent disregarded or closed its ears to the unlettered throngs that helped bring it to redemption, and embarked on a government based on reason-a reason belonging to all for the common good, not the university brand of reason over the peasant brand. The problem of independence did not lie in a change of forms but in change of spirit."

"It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed, in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors."

"The youth of America are rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands in the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows. They realize that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. "Create" is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country's form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. Absolute ideas must take relative forms if they are not to fail because of an error in form. Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies."

"The general holds back his cavalry to a pace that suits his infantry, for if its infantry is left behind, the cavalry will be surrounded by the enemy."

"Politics and strategy are one. Nations should live in an atmosphere of self-criticism because it is healthy, but always with one heart and one mind. Stoop to the unhappy, and lift them up in your arms! Thaw out frozen America with the fire of your hearts! Make the natural blood of the nations´ course vigorously through their veins! The new American are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate."

"One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. One must allow the best to be shown so that it reveals and prevails over the worst. Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell them the truth in time."

"There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. The theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveller vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man's universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent hunger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity."

"Yo soy un hombre sincero De donde crece la palma Y antes de morirme quiero Echar mis versos del alma."

"I come from all places and to all places I go: I am art among the arts and mountain among mountains. I know the strange names of flowers and herbs and of fatal deceptions and magnificent griefs. In night's darkness I've seen raining down on my head pure flames, flashing rays of beauty divine."

"Wings I saw springing from fair women's shoulders, and from beneath rubble I've seen butterflies flutter."

"Once I reveled in a destiny like no other joy I'd known: when the warden — reading my death sentence — wept."

"I know that when the world surrenders, pallid, to repose, the murmur of a tranquil stream through the deep silence flows."

"All is beautiful and unceasing, all is music and reason, and all, like diamond, is carbon first, then light."

"My poems are like a dagger Sprouting flowers from the hilt; My poetry is like a fountain Sprinkling streams of coral water."

"My poems please the brave: My poems, short and sincere, Have the force of steel Which forges swords."

"Life on earth is a hand-to-hand mortal combat... between the law of love and the law of hate."