Pedro Calderón de la Barca Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
A good action is never lost; it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer's need.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
But whether it be dream or truth, to do well is what matters. If it be truth, for truth's sake. If not, then to gain friends for the time when we awaken.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly,
Waking in the dawn of the morning,
In the evening will be a pitiful frivolity,
Sleeping in the cold night's arms.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
The treason past, the traitor is no longer needed.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
For man's greatest crime is to have been born.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confess An unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akin In missing each that salutory rein Of reason, and the grinding will of man.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
What surprises you, if a dream taught me this wisdom, and if I still fear I may wake up and find myself once more confined in prison? And even if this should not happen, merely to dream it is enough. For this I have come to know, that all human happiness finally ceases, like a dream.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives, Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake, How if our waking life, like that of sleep, Be all a dream in that eternal life To which we wake not till we sleep in death

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves respect; for of women do we not all come?

Pedro Calderón de la Barca