José Martí

THOUGHTS

Carlos Ripoll

ON MORALITY AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

91.- We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it. If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially those who did not bring flour.

92.- Justice is a rare gift, a gift sublime. Every man has a bit of the lion in him and wants the lion's share of life for himself. He complains of oppression by others, but no sooner is he able to oppress than he oppresses. He cries out against another's monopoly, but no sooner can he monopolize than he monopolizes. Not for nothing when the Old Testament needed a name for an admirable man it called him "a just one." Not to want everything for oneself, to deprive oneself of something so that all receive equal shares, seems a heroic virtue, judging by the scant number who display it.

93.- It is necessary to make virtue fashionable.

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

95.- Are there not times when the human being is a beast, when his teeth need to bite, his throat feels a portentous thirst, his eyes flame, and his clenched fists seek bodies to strike? To bridle the beast and seat an angel in the saddle is human victory.

96.- Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity. He who seeks it elsewhere will not find it for, having drunk from all the glasses of life, he will find satisfaction only in those.

97.- Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who avails himself of a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if he too risks his life. To give one's life is a right only when one gives it unselfishly.

98.- One can live without bread, but not without love. No occasion to console all sadness, to caress a wilted brow, to kindle a languid gaze, to clasp a hand warm with love, should be wasted. Tenderness is a perpetual task, a task for every instant.

99.- Talent is a gift that brings with it an obligation to serve the world, and not ourselves, for it is not of our making. To use for our exclusive benefit what is not ours is theft. Culture, which makes talent shine, is not completely ours either, nor can we place it solely at our disposal. Rather, it belongs mainly to our country, which gave it to us, and to humanity, from which we receive it as a birthright. A selfish person is a thief.

100.- People form two factions: those who love and build and those who hate and destroy. The struggles of the world have always come down to the Hindu dualism of good against evil.

101.- It is necessary to do good, even after death. Therefore, I write.

102.- One who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.

103.- Everything that divides people, everything that categorizes, separates or corrals them is a sin against humanity.

104.- A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all people can be honest, and should be honest himself. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a person who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

105.- In what country does hatred not breed beasts?

106.- A hero is more heroic the less human ingratitude embitters his sacrifice.

107.- Humanity does not redeem itself without a certain amount of suffering, and when some avoid it, others must bear a heavier burden so that all may be saved.

108.- Those who have set eyes on the depths of mankind and have seen nations seethe, flaming and bloodied, in the cauldron of the centuries know that the future, without a single exception, is on the side of duty. If there is failure it is because duty was not understood in all its purity, but rather tied to petty passions, or because duty was not exercised with disinterest and efficacy.

109.- Every person has within an ideal being, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo.

110.- It is the duty of every individual to raise people up. One is guilty of all abjection that one does not help to relieve. Only those who spread treachery, fire, and death out of hatred for the prosperity of others are undeserving of pity.

111.- Double-breasted frockcoats, and humble shirts fit apostles and bandits alike.

112.- There are people who live contented though they live without decorum. Others suffer as if in agony when they see around them people living without decorum. There must be a certain amount of decorum in the world, just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without decorum, there are always others who themselves possess the decorum of many men. These are the ones who rebel with terrible strength against those who rob nations of their liberty, which is to rob people of their decorum. Embodied in those individuals are thousands, a whole people, human dignity.

113.- Every person is obliged to overcome his bitterness.

114.- The war against hate is perhaps the last essential, definitive and legitimate war.

115.- Through a marvelous law of natural compensation, those who give themselves grow, and those who turn inward and live from small pleasures, are afraid to share them with others, and only think avariciously of cultivating their appetites lose their humanity and become loneliness itself. They carry in their breasts all the dreariness of winter. They become in fact and appearance insects.

116.- No one should die as long as he can still be good for something. Like all things, life should not be taken apart except by one who can put it together again. To undo what cannot be redone is to steal. He who kills himself is a thief.

117.- Each person who is born is a reason to live.

118.- Morality is the basis for a good religion. Religion is the embodiment of the natural belief in God and the natural tendency to inquire about and revere God. To be religious is inherent in being human. An irreligious nation will die, because nothing in it will nourish virtue. Human injustice disinclines us to virtue. Celestial justice is necessary to guarantee it.

119.- Ideology never excuses crime and its barbarous refinement.

120.- At times, because prudence slows us down, the impatient think it obstructs, without seeing that it is like the brake of a train that prevents its reaching the bottom of the slope in bloodied splinters. To restrain is to accelerate.

121.- It is natural and human for man to think constantly of himself, even in his acts of greatest abnegation and self-neglect, to attempt to reconcile his personal advancement with the public interest, and to serve the latter in a way that will benefit the former, or not harm it very much.

122.- Absolute moral greatness, which is the concern of heaven, is often a crime in history, which is the concern of human beings.

123.- Man is not an image engraved on a silver dollar, with covetous eyes, licking lips and a diamond pin on a silver dickey. Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

124.- What proud work could be done by sending forth to face life together three beings who think differently about it: one, like the Brahman and the Morabite, given to the impossible worship of absolute truth, the second to exuberant self-interest, and the third with a Brahman's spirit restrained by prudent reason and going through life as I do, sadly and sure that no reward will come, daily drawing fresh water from an ever recalcitrant stone.

125.- It is always the humble, the barefoot, the homeless, the fishermen, who gather shoulder to shoulder against evil and lift the Gospel to flight with their luminous, silver wings. Truth is revealed best to the poor and those who suffer. A glass of water and a piece of bread never deceive.

126.- Only those who despair of reaching the peaks want to topple them. Heights are good, and man is as divine as he is capable of reaching them. But the heights belong to mankind, and the path to them should be open to all.

127.- To be a man on earth is a very difficult and seldom successful career.

128.- A genuine person goes to the roots. To be a radical is no more than that: to go to the roots. He who does not see things in their depth should not call himself a radical.

129.- Excessive suffering drives the soul to great resolve. Cowards turn to the barrel of a pistol and disappear with the smoke of gunpowder. Those with energy reach for the sword, the plow or the pen and, though they may be broken inside, like a rosary with a snapped string, they build. Man has to be downtrodden like a beast before the hero in him appears.

130.- To busy oneself with what is futile when one can do something useful, to attend to what is simple when one has the mettle to attempt what is difficult, is to strip talent of its dignity. It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing.

131.- The seed of the despot is in every man. No sooner does an atom of power fall into his hand than he thinks Jupiter's eagle is by his side, and that the whole universe is his.

132.- Now more than ever we need temples of love and humanity that free everything that is generous in man and bind everything that is crude and low in him.

133.- He who overcomes his sorrows and self-interest and, raising his head for an instant above the heads of others, sees them marching, marching like an army, can be satisfied with his comrades in arms and lie down to die, even if some here and there happily follow Catiline or turn their backs on Demosthenes. Man is ugly, but humanity is beautiful.

134.- Talent is given by nature and has the same value as an apricot or a nut. But character is different; man makes his own character; gives it life and color with his blood; saves it with his hands from temptations that call like sirens and from dangers that hiss like snakes. Character is indeed a source of pride, and he who displays it shines.

135.- Everything lies in the moral courage with which the apparent injustice of life is faced and mastered. As long as there is a good deed to do, a right to defend, a sound and strong book to read, a quiet mountain spot, a good woman and a true friend, a sensitive heart will have vigor enough to love and praise what is beautiful and ordered in life.

136.- Men of action, above all those whose actions are guided by love, live forever. Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.

137.- There is happiness in duty, although it may not seem so. To fulfill one's duty elevates the soul to a state of constant sweetness. Love is the bond between people, the way to teach and the center of the world.

138.- One should want and should strive to bring about whatever draws people together and makes their lives more virtuous and bearable.

139.- Human beings need to be reverent. They take pleasure in forgetting things that are impure. They magnify purity, as if they needed it.

140.- In truth, people speak too much of danger. Let others be terrified by the natural and healthy risks of life! We shall not be frightened! Poison sumac grows in a hard-worker's field, the serpent hisses from its hidden den, and the owl's eye shines in the belfry, but the sun goes on lighting the sky, and truth continues marching across the earth unscathed.