30 phrases by Eça de Queiroz to delve into Portuguese literature

It is eating that makes you hungry.

Don’t be afraid to think differently than others, be afraid to think alike and find out that everyone is wrong.

Heaven and hell are conceptions for use by the common people.

Who doesn’t know the power of prayer, it’s because he hasn’t lived the bitterness of life!

The heart is ordinarily a term used, out of decency, to designate another organ.

Pessimism is excellent for the inert, because it mitigates the unsightly crime of inertia.

Love is essentially perishable, and the moment it is born it begins to die. Only beginnings are good.

Politicians and diapers are similar, they have the same content.

What merit is there in loving those who love us?

It is the heart that makes the character.

Curiosity: instinct that leads some to look through the keyhole, and others to discover America.

When you don’t have what you like, you have to like what you have.

My critical spirit is thick, I only pick up on things of enormous importance.

In art, the indiscipline of the new, their rebellious force of resistance to the currents of tradition, is indispensable for the revival of invention and creative power, and for artistic originality.

To every living corresponds a suffering.

In the loves of this world, since Eve, there is always one who loves and another who lets himself be loved.

This (temporary) separation has this good thing – it highlights and makes interesting a thousand little things in the lives of those we love – that until then, seen every day, were almost not noticed.

Man, what have you done with your soul?

With the tax authorities, you always pay and you never question, because naturally you are forced to pay more afterwards.

In these industrial and materialist democracies, furiously engaged in the struggle for selfish bread, souls are daily becoming drier and less capable of pity.

cry! Cry, while me, the pain suffocates me!

Two sheets of letters to read is a good account, even when it’s a love letter.

The most genuinely human feelings soon become dehumanized in the city.

There would be no right to win if there were no right to forgive.

There can be no connection of souls where there is no identity of ideas, beliefs and customs.

There is nothing louder – and more vividly danced with a glitter of sequins – than politics.

There is nothing new under the sun, and the eternal repetition of things is the eternal repetition of evils. The more you know, the more it hurts. And the righteous and the wicked, born of dust, become dust.

I’m chattering a lot. This happens to me whenever I’m pretty stupid.

The soul shapes the face, as the ancient potter’s breath shaped the fine vessel.

Art, for those who have not all shut themselves up in it as in the walls of a monastery, singularly poetizes existence.