Top 40 Machado de Assis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We kill time; time buries us.”

— Machado de Assis

2. “Tears are not arguments.”

— Machado de Assis

3. “Do not feel badly if your kindness is rewarded with ingratitude; it is better to fall from your dream clouds than from a third-story window.”

— Machado de Assis

4. “There is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.”

— Machado de Assis

5. “Por que bonita, se coxa? Por que coxa, se bonita?”

— Machado de Assis

6. “Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.”

— Machado de Assis

7. “A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism.”

— Machado de Assis

8. “Dreams disdain fine lines and finishing touches on landscapes – they content themselves with thick but representative brushstrokes.”

— Machado de Assis

9. “I had no children, I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of our misery.”

— Machado de Assis

10. “To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores.”

— Machado de Assis

11. “He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.”

— Machado de Assis

12. “There is nothing worse than giving the longest of legs to the smallest of ideas.”

— Machado de Assis

13. “It’s the occasion that makes the revolution.”

— Machado de Assis

14. “Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.”

— Machado de Assis

15. “Tomorrow’s sun is on it’s way – a relentless sun, inscrutable like life.”

— Machado de Assis

16. “Tis good to be sad and say nothing!” – When these words of Shakespeare caught my attention, I confess I felt an echo, a delicious echo.”

— Machado de Assis

17. “The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.”

— Machado de Assis

18. “With that, the years slipped away, though not her beauty, because she had never had any.”

— Machado de Assis

19. “I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.”

— Machado de Assis

20. “Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.”

— Machado de Assis

21. “Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next.”

— Machado de Assis

22. “He sucked the chicken wing philosophically.”

— Machado de Assis

23. “But this is what makes us lords of the earth, it is this power to restore the past, to touch the instability of our impressions and the vanity of our affections.”

— Machado de Assis

24. “The most singular thing is that, if the clock stopped, I wound it, so that it did not miss a tick, and I could count all my lost moments.”

— Machado de Assis

25. “In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency.”

— Machado de Assis

26. “To the Victor, the Potatoes!”

— Machado de Assis

27. “I preferred to sleep, which is an interim way of dying.”

— Machado de Assis

28. “He wanted to explain philosophy to me; I asked him not to.”

— Machado de Assis

29. “Assim vai a vida humana: um nada basta para complicar tudo.”

— Machado de Assis

30. “He had found in himself the perfect, undeniable case of insanity. He possessed wisdom, patience, tolerance, truthfulness, loyalty, and moral fortitude – all the qualities that go to make an utter madman.”

— Machado de Assis

31. “Ah! were you careful to tie me to the cliff of your frivolity, your indifference, or your agitation?”

— Machado de Assis

32. “A man’s eye serves as a photography to the invisible, as well as his ear serves as echo to the silence.”

— Machado de Assis

33. “My youth was reacting, it was necessary to live.”

— Machado de Assis

34. “I have noticed that the adulation of women is not the same as that of men. The latter smacks of servility; the first can be confused with affection.”

— Machado de Assis

35. “The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.”

— Machado de Assis

36. “I took her hand, pulled it lightly to me, and kissed her on the forehead, with the delicacy of a zephyr and the gravity of Abraham.”

— Machado de Assis

37. “I let myself go to the to and fro of events and days, sometimes bewildered, sometimes apathetic, between ambition and discouragement.”

— Machado de Assis

38. “Nothing could have been more imprudent or more natural than this reply. It reflected the ecstasy inspired by great crises.”

— Machado de Assis

39. “His eyes, blind to external reality but highly perceptive in the realm of the inner life, rose from the book to the ceiling and returned to the book.”

— Machado de Assis

40. “Lascivious one, the voluptuousness of nothing awaits you.”

— Machado de Assis

41. “She was not just inviting scandal, she was inviting it in partnership with ridicule.”

— Machado de Assis

42. “A ridiculous old age is perhaps the saddest and ultimate surprise human nature may have in store.”

— Machado de Assis

43. “Ambition, since it is an eagle, cracked the egg on that occasion, and unveiled the bright, penetrating eye inside.”

— Machado de Assis

44. “Each century brought its share of shadow and light, apathy and combat, truth and error, and its courtship of systems, new ideas, new illusions.”

— Machado de Assis

45. “Come on, Pandora, open your belly, and digest me; This thing is amusing, but digest me.”

— Machado de Assis

46. “He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else.”

— Machado de Assis

47. “Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis.”

— Machado de Assis