“Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.”

“No one blames a pilot who takes refuge in port when the storm begins to blow. It is not cowardice to duck under a bullet; what is wrong is to defy it only to fall and never rise again.”

“In every instance I noted that a people’s prosperity or misery lay in direct proportion to its freedom or its inhibitions and, along the same lines, of the sacrifice or selfishness of its ancestors.”

“I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra”

“Man understood in the end what man is. He renounces the analysis of God, penetrating the impalpable, in which he has not seen, to give laws to the phantasms of his brain. Man understands that his inheritance is the greater world whose dominion is within his grasp. Tired of useless and presumptuous labor he bows his head and looks about him, and now he sees how our poets are born. Little by little nature's muses open their treasures and start to smile upon us, and lead us far from such labors.”

“What was exchanged in the language of their eyes, more perfect than their lips, the language afforded the soul so that no sound disturbs an ecstasy of feeling? In those moments, when the thought of the two happy beings meld through their pupils, words move slowly, coarsely, like the raspy, awkward noise of thunder from dazzling light that appears after the quickness of the flash. It expresses feelings previously known, ideas yet understood, and in the end, if one must use words, it is because the heart’s ambitions—which dominates one’s whole being and overflows with happiness—wishes with the whole human organism, with all its physical and psychical faculties, to embody the poem of joy that the spirit has intoned. Language has no answer to the questions of love that either shimmer or hide within a glance. The smile must respond; the kiss, the sigh.”

“For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.”