Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by Machado de Assis

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known by his surnames as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. Nevertheless, Assis did not achieve widespread popularity outside Brazil during his lifetime. In 1897 he founded and became the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was multilingual, having taught himself French, English, German and Greek in later life.

Brazilian - Novelist | June 21, 1839 - September 29, 1908

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.

Machado de Assis

Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next.

Machado de Assis

A vida sem luta é um mar morto no centro do organismo universal.

Machado de Assis

Tears are not arguments.

Machado de Assis

There is nothing worse than giving the longest of legs to the smallest of ideas.

Machado de Assis

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

Machado de Assis

Do not feel badly if your kindness is rewarded with ingratitude; it is better to fall from your dream clouds than from a third-story window.

Machado de Assis

We kill time; time buries us.

Machado de Assis

The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.

Machado de Assis

Tomorrow's sun is on it's way - a relentless sun, inscrutable like life.

Machado de Assis

In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.

Machado de Assis

It's the occasion that makes the revolution.

Machado de Assis

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

I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.

Machado de Assis

There is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.

Machado de Assis

A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism.

Machado de Assis

In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency.

Machado de Assis