José Maria Eça de Queiroz Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

I came to the conclusion – as one invariably does in philosophy – that I was up against a primary cause and therefore an insoluble one.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
In general, we Portuguese only begin to be idiotic when we reach the age of reason. While we are young we all have a spark of genius.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
Superior forms of thought have a fatal tendency of later becoming revealed law: and all philosophy ends, in its last stages, by becoming religion.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
Perhaps one day, when socialism is the State religion, there will be niches in the temples, with a little lamp in front, and inside, images of the Fathers of the Revolution: Proudhon complete with glasses, Bacunin looking like a bear under his Russian pelts, Karl Marx leaning on his staff – symbolic of the shepherd of souls.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
Even the pot-bellied abbot, who in the evening sits on his veranda with a paternal air, enjoying his coffee and picking the holes in his teeth, has in his innermost soul the makings of a Torquemada.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
Love makes man spiritual – and woman material.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
Human effort may manage at its best to transform a starving proletariat into a well-fed bourgeoisie; but then a worse proletariat emerges from the bowels of society. Jesus was right, there will always be the poor among us. Which proves that this humanity is the greatest error that God ever committed.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
The Englishman falls on the ideas and customs of other nations like a lump of granite in the water: and there he stays, a weighty encumbrance, with his Bible, his sports and his prejudices, his etiquette and selfishness – completely unaccommodating to those among whom he lives. That is why he remains, in the countries where he has lived for centuries, a foreigner.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz
A strange people, for whom it is out of the question that anyone can be moral without reading the Bible, and strong without playing cricket, and a gentleman without being English! And it is this that makes them so detested. They never fuse, they never lose their Englishness.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz