José Martí

THOUGHTS

Carlos Ripoll

ON MISCELLANEOUS SUBJECTS

166.- To educate is to deposit in each person all previous human work. It is to make each person a summary of the living world up to the time in which the person lives. It is to bring people to the level of their times, so they can float above them and not sink. It is to prepare people for life.

167.- Imagination is like a torch held in front of reason, brightening it so that it can see what it contemplates, what imagination has discovered. Impatient, imagination leaves reason behind in reflection while it goes forth to discover new fields. Imagination offers reason, in its hours of doubt, the solutions that it seeks vainly without the help of imagination.

168.- Trenches of ideas are better than trenches of stone.

169.- No, human life is not all of life! The tomb is a way, not an end. The mind could not conceive what it would be incapable of achieving; existence cannot be the abominable toy of an evil madman... Death is jubilation, renewal, a new task. Human life would be a repugnant and barbaric invention if it were limited to life on earth.

170.- Everyone should devote himself to what is nearest him, not because what is his is superior or finer, or more virtuous than that of others, but because a person's influence is exerted better and more naturally on what is familiar to him, from which he derives immediate sorrow or pleasure. Such a distribution of human labor, and nothing else, is the true and unassailable concept of fatherland.

171.- Men cannot be more perfect than the sun. The sun burns with the same light with which it heats. The sun has spots. Ingrates talk of nothing but the spots. The grateful talk of the light.

172.- Every tyranny has at hand one of those learned men to think and write, to justify, to extenuate, and to disguise. Sometimes it has many of them, because literature is often coupled with an appetite for luxury, and with the latter comes a willingness to sell oneself to whomever can satisfy it.

173.- Neither is the beauty of the day darkened by the crimes committed in its light, nor is the power of speech diminished by its abuse.

174.- This is the age in which the hills are nearing the heights of mountains and peaks are subsiding into plains-an age already close to the next one in which all plains will be peaks.

175.- Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggar's smile from the scorn of free men.

176.- The earth has its wolves and its sheep and, if you want to live without trouble, you have to offer your tender flesh up to the wolves, and your wool to dreams, or be a wolf. Those who try to free the sheep from servitude will be eaten by the wolves, and abandoned by the sheep.

177.- Ideas, like misfortunes, announce their arrival. When a problem requires a solution, it issues from everywhere more or less confused and occurs vaguely to everyone. Prudent people should not disdain public instinct.

178.- Neither men nor nations can avoid the task of developing themselves-of paying their way in the world. In this world, all of us-nations and men-must pay our fare.

179.- To visit the oppressor's house is to sanction oppression... As long as a nation has not won its rights, any of its children who feast in the house of those who subjugate its people is an enemy of the people.

180.- Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but it is impossible to stop them.

181.- Every person is the cage of an eagle; we can feel the beating of its wings, the groans of its captivity, the pain from its claws in our breasts and skulls.

182.- All the great ideas of reform are crystallized by apostles or petrified in crimes, depending on whether in their burning course they inflame spirits of love or spirits of destruction.

183.- The struggles waged by nations are weak only when they lack support in the hearts of their women. But when women are moved and lend help, when women, who are by nature calm and controlled, give encouragement and applause, when virtuous and knowledgeable women grace the endeavor with their sweet love, then it is invincible.

184.- Redemption has become formal; it must be essential again. Political liberty will not be secure until spiritual liberty is secured. There is an urgent need to free people from the tyranny and convention that twist their sentiments, jostle their senses, and overburden their intelligence.

185.- To honor in name what in essence one hates and fights is like pressing a man against one's breast in friendship while driving a dagger into his side.

186.- In order to know a country one must study all its aspects and expressions, its elements, its tendencies, its apostles, its poets, and its bandits.

187.- Death is a lie when one has worked well in life. The thinking skull turns to dust, but its thoughts live forever and bear fruit.

188.- In those nations where religion has shown itself to be hostile to the natural and expansive exercise of human faculties, hatred of religion has been one of the natural forms of love of liberty.

189.- Genius sees before studying what the intellect attains only after study. Genius is foreknowledge and foresight.

190.- People are like the times in which they live. They adapt themselves with marvelous flexibility to the insignificance or greatness of their times.

191.- The most stubborn aspect of man's faith in religion is his faith in himself and his proud reluctance to believe he is capable of error. The most powerful aspect of faith is our fondness for the tender age when we received it and for the beloved hands that gave it to us.

192.- As soon as a flagstaff is raised up, men are all about looking for an axe. But it is nature's will that evil passions tire before virtue does.

193.- There are no more luxuriant or fragrant flowers than those that bloom over the dead. The strength to achieve new glories is drawn from loving glories of the past.

194.- Education is the birthright of every person. Afterwards, in payment, that person has the duty to contribute to the education of others.

195.- It grieves one to charge for what one thinks, and more so if when one thinks, one loves.

196.- Imagination is an eagle, and it flies; self-interest is a hog, and it moves slowly. The battle between impatient thinkers and lazy nations is a battle between eagles and hogs. But the day is not far when an eagle will be born in the breast of every hog, when human beings, who have been awakening for four centuries, will be fully awake and will become masters of themselves.

197.- The press ought to be inquiry and censure, never hate or anger, for neither leaves room for the free expression of ideas.

198.- Dealing only with the supernatural of course

distances the spirit from merely human solutions. People who are extraordinary independently of the extraordinary factors that history, literature, and art can bring to bear on their character are ill equipped to legislate in ordinary matters. An eagle does not walk at a trot-and that is life, making an eagle trot.

199.- To read what is beautiful, to know the harmony of the universe, to be in touch with great ideas and noble deeds, to have intimate dealings with the best that the human soul has given throughout history, enlivens and broadens the intelligence, gives us reins to hold back fleeting domestic joys, satisfies far more deeply and delicately than mere fortune, sweetens and ennobles the life of those who do not have fortune and, by bringing together people who are alike in high endeavors, creates the national spirit.

200.- Tolerance in peace time is as great as heroism in war.

201.- Under the pretext of developing the human being, they stunt him. No sooner is he born than they stand ready by his cradle with large, strong bandages, with philosophies, religions, with the passions of his parents, with their political systems. They bind him, and they swaddle him and, thus, for the rest of his life on earth, man is a bridled horse.

202.- We do not disdain science. We embrace her with fervor. We pursue her with active admiration. We learn what she has to tell us. Her efforts inspire us to veneration. But when, beyond what is already known to us, we ask her to explain what we do not yet know, then, as if to take leave of a glorious guide who does not want to compromise her existence by accompanying us on our voyage, from the landing that leads us to the immensity that we foresee, we turn to our respectable, dear friend who watches us impotently from the shore, and we bid her farewell with sadness.

203.- Everyone, straight or woolly haired, has a right to his free conscience. A Catholic who places himself above a Hindu is a tyrant, as is a Methodist who hisses at a Catholic. Let the Creoles who are prevented from denying and the Catholics who are prevented from professing find in us their shield. A sincere man has the right to err.

204.- Among the many men made from the same mold, he who breaks it, creates himself, and is creative, shines as if he embodied the light of the sun. He radiates heat, and he blinds. Human nature is pleased by those who are dazzling, productive, and enterprising, and it often prefers brilliant and glorious folly to moderate and calm reason. Every rebel has an accomplice in each man. He who proclaims that he wants to be himself inspires admiration.

205.- There are people who, because of their base nature, are made to be stepped on... There are some who take their master for his morning bath each day a servile basin filled with the blood of their land.

206.- Solitude overwhelms us, and when we find a brother in our loneliness we are no longer alone. The pain stops, because one of its sources is no longer there. Some part of what was sought is found and, since human beings are creatures of will, feeling, and wants and always tend to synthesize, they believe everything is embodied in the piece they have found. The pain stops through fiction and exaltation, and that is pleasure. Friendship and love, the two forms of this consoling relationship, are very pure sources of pleasure.

207.- When human circumstances change, literature, philosophy, and religion, which is part of philosophy, change. Heaven has always been modeled on human beings, and it has been peopled with serene, joyous or vindictive images, depending on whether the nation that created it lived in peace, in the pleasure of the senses, or in slavery and torment. Every jolt in the history of a people alters its Olympus.

208.- There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. Feeble thinkers, thinkers by lamplight, invent and rekindle booklearned races that impartial travelers and loving observers look for in vain in the order of nature, where the universal identity of man is evident in his victorious love and in his turbulent appetites. The same soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies different in shape and color.

209.- Every house we inhabit in a foreign land is somewhat like a ship. There is always in it an indefinable sense of unease. We feel the ground sway, and our feet are unsure on it. At times we hold fast to the walls, and we stumble where others walk firmly. Our spirit is off balance.

210.- In times when honor wavers, to reward publicly those who act in accordance with it is not only an expression of gratitude but a service to honor itself. Such rewards are never useless, because the inevitable tendency of people to avoid sacrifice demands that everything great and likeable about it be placed continually before their eyes. Only those who see their own worthlessness, or their lesser merit, revealed in its light murmur against homage.

211.- After ages of faith come those of criticism. After ages of capricious synthesis come those of scrupulous analysis. The more trusting was the faith, the more skeptical is the analysis. The greater was the abandonment of reason, the greater are the boldness and energy with which it is later applied. We never turn against anything so wholeheartedly as we turn against ourselves.

212.- The only way to people the earth with the vigorous and creative generation it needs is to make free will secure, to allow the spirit to live in its seductive genuine shape, not to dim virgin natures with the imposition of alien prejudice, to let those natures choose what is useful for themselves without confusing them or pushing them along a rut.

213.- All beliefs must be permitted to come out into the light of the day so that the air may heal and purify them. When they are compelled not to leave the heart, they acquire there the strength of a temple and the colors of a flag, and the compressed activity goes on building up until it finally explodes in wars. No human factor can be suppressed.

214.- An honest man will not go out to the street to crush all the vipers that cross his path because his heels will become too filthy. He endures and waits, with faith in virtue.

215.- Those who want to sacrifice themselves are considered enemies by those who do not want self-sacrifice. They throw stones at them so as not to feel obliged to follow them, to bleed with them, to become poor with them, and like them to abandon a dishonorable life of humiliation and complicity, of sanction and submission, of guilty presence and ignominious smile at the feet of those who consume the bread and corrupt the character of their country.