1. “Our greatest endeavor must be to make ourselves irreplaceable. . . .No one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die. For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any other I; each one of us - our soul, that is, not our life - is worth the whole Universe. . . .
2. And to act in such a way to make our annihilation an injustice, in such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers sons, and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something within the reach of all.
3. All of us, each one of us, can and ought to give as much of himself as he possible can - nay, to give more than he can, to exceed himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable.”
4. "For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth"
5. “It is a grand and terrible thing that the hero should be the only one to see his heroism from the inside, to see into its very vitals, and that everyone else sees it only from the outside, in its external features. It is for this reason that the hero lives alone in the midst of men and that his solitude serves him as comforting company....he will be ready to bear with resignation the misfortune of having his neighbors judge him according to the general law and not the law of God.”
6. "Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death."
7. "Man dies of cold, not of darkness."
8. “Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary system is itself but a molecule, is in turn but a cell in the Universe, in the Body of God.”
9. "Science is a cemetery of dead ideas."
10. “The best book on universal history, the most lasting and extensive and comprehensive and true, would be the one which succeeded in recounting, in all their liveliness and depth, the quarrels, intrigues, parochial plots, and gossip that occur in Carbajosa de la Sierra (a village of 300 souls) between the mayor and his wife, the school teacher and his mate, the town clerk and his girl friend on the one hand, and the priest and his housekeeper, Uncle Roque and Aunty Mezuca on the other, each side assisted by a chorus of both sexes. What else was the Trojan War, to which we owe the Iliad?”
11. “The devil is an angel too.”
12. “...the most comprehensive, the most all-encompassing formula for tolerance: if you want me to believe you, you believe me. The society of man is cemented with mutual credit. Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.”
13. "The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness."
14. “There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. . . . Man is the more man-that is, the more divine-the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.”
15. “There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea-breaker.”
16. "The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found."
17. “Those who love me dearly--who are they?They are simply those who want me to be as they wish so they may love me. Love, love, terrible love, which leads us to seek in the beloved for the man we made of him. Who can love me as I am? You, you alone, my Lord, who create me continually out of love, for my very existence is the work of your eternal love. Reader, listen: though I do not know you, I love you so much that if I could hold you in my hands, I would open up your breast and in your heart's core I would make a wound and into it I would rub vinegar and salt, so that you might never again know peace but would live in continual anguish and endless longing. If I have not succeeded indisquieting you with this Quixote of mine it is because of my heavy-handedness, believe me, and because this dead paper on which I write neither shrieks, nor cries out, nor sighs, nor laments, and because language was not made for you and me to understand each other.”
18. "To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
19. “True Science teaches, above all, to doubt, and to be ignorant.”
20. "We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe."
21. "When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid -- in which case all comment is superfluous -- or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem."
