Juan Ram�n Jim�nez

Spain
27 Dec 1881 // 29 May 1958
Poet

Quotes



A fantasy can be equivalent to a paradise and if the fantasy passes, better yet, because eternal paradise would be very boring.
The background reveals the true being and state of being of the man or thing. If I do not possess the background, I make the man transparent, the thing transparent.
Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.
I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.
The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.
A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
One must speak in such a way that although someone else, or many others, or an infinite number of people have said it before, it seems as though you said it first.

The Complete Perfectionist
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
To live is nothing more than to come here to die, to be what we were before being born, but with apprenticeship, experience, knowledge of cause, and perhaps with will.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays