Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Juan Ramon Jimenez

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.

To live is nothing more than to come here to die, to be what we were before being born, but with apprenticeship, experience, knowledge of cause, and perhaps with will.

My only two weapons: time and silence.

I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each day, each hour, an entire life.

Love, you are eternal like springtime.

Back of my forehead I feel tonight A whole sky full of stars. Under a western moon. Life is indeed lovely!

Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

The background reveals the true being and state of being of the man or thing. If I do not possess the background, I make the man transparent, the thing transparent.

…Perhaps this momentary life of ours is only the light that divides our infinite origin from our infinite end.

Some of my affectionate envious friends say, "You write too much." Maybe, I answer. But as long as the best of your little is worse than the worst of my much, I will keep on doing so.

Dynamic ecstasy is absolute romanticism , absolute heroism . And here I return to my point. From my point of view, after the catastrophe which we feel and think is universal, a catastrophe resulting from an excess of useless dynamism of useless progress, of useless realism, of useless technology, after this an unattainable democracy is to be reached through the conception and realization of a new romanticism.

I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.

A fantasy can be equivalent to a paradise and if the fantasy passes, better yet, because eternal paradise would be very boring.

I unpetalled you, like a rose, to see your soul, and I didn't see it. But everything around -horizons of land and of seas-, everything, out to the infinite, was filled with a fragrance, enormous and alive.

The urban man is an uprooted tree, he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth!

Rodin picks a mushroom delighted, and shows it to Madame Rodin... "Look," he says excitedly, "and that takes but a single night! In one night all these are made, all these lamellas. That is good work."