José Martí Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

José Martí
Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro.

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

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

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

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

José Martí
Liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.

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

José Martí
One just principle from the depths of a cave is more powerful than an army.

José Martí
He who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.

José Martí
Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.

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

José Martí
The vote is the most effective and merciful instrument that man has devised to manage his affairs.

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

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

José Martí
Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.

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

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

José Martí
Everything that divides men, everything that specified, separates or pens them, is a sin against humanity.

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

José Martí
I have lived in the monster [the United States] and I know its insides; and my sling is the sling of David.

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

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

José Martí
I am an an honest man
From where the palm tree grows,
And I want, before I die,
to cast these verses from my soul.

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

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

José Martí
Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

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

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

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

José Martí