Noli Me Tángere

I have to believe much in God because I have lost my faith in man.

Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.

What said those two souls communicating through the language of the eyes, more perfect than that of the lips, the language given to the soul in order that sound may not mar the ecstasy of feeling? In such moments, when the thoughts of two happy beings penetrate into each other’s souls through the eyes, the spoken word is halting, rude, and weak—it is as the harsh, slow roar of the thunder compared with the rapidity of the dazzling lightning flash, expressing feelings already recognized, ideas already understood, and if words are made use of it is only because the heart’s desire, dominating all the being and flooding it with happiness, wills that the whole human organism with all its physical and psychical powers give expression to the song of joy that rolls through the soul. To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer.

How long have you been away from the country?" Laruja asked Ibarra. "Almost seven years." "Then you have probably forgotten all about it." "Quite the contrary. Even if my country does seem to have forgotten me, I have always thought about it.

To be happy does not mean to indulge in foolishness!

It is not the criminals who arouse the hatred of others, but the men who are honest.

The people do not complain because they have no voice; do not move because they are lethargic, and you say that they do not suffer because you have not seen their hearts bleed.

I can concede that the government has no knowledge of the people, but I believe the people know less of the government. There are useless officials, evil, if you like, but there are also good ones, and these are not able to accomplish anything because they encounter an inert mass, the population that takes little part in matters that concern them.

I die without seeing dawn's light shining on my country... You, who will see it, welcome it for me...don't forget those who fell during the nighttime.

I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra

The example could encourage others who only fear to start.

Let us not ask for miracles, let us not ask for concern with what is good for the country of him who comes as a stranger to make his fortune and leave afterwards.

Dying people don't need medicine, the ones who remain do.

Our young people think about nothing more than love affairs and pleasure. They spend more time attempting to seduce and dishonor young women than in thinking about their country's welfare. Our women, in order to take care of the house and family of God, forget their own. Our men limit their activities to vice and their heroics to shameful acts. Children wake up in a fog of routine, adolescents live out their best years without ideals, and their elders are sterile, and only serve to corrupt our young people by their example.

I honor the father in his son, not the son in his father. Each one receives a reward or punishment for his deeds, but not for the acts of others.

Your enemies hate you more than they hate your ideas. Should you want a project to be undone propose it. Even if it were as useful as a bishop's mire it would be rejected. Once you are defeated let the humblest-looking among you sponsor it and your enemies to humble you will approve it.

The whys and wherefores didn’t need to be said. If you are reading this have ever loved someone, you will understand. Putting it into words is useless. The uninitiated cannot understand the mysterious.

In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.

People believe that madness is when you don't think as they do, which is why they take me for a madman.

The righteous man pays the sinner's bill.

But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?

She was white, perhaps too white. Her eyes, which were almost always cast down, when she raised them testified to the purest of souls, and when she smiled, revealing her small, white teeth, one might be tempted to say that a rose is merely a plant, and ivory just an elephant’s tusk.

Maria Clara did not faint, simply because the Filipinos do not know how to faint.

In every instance I noted that a people’s prosperity or misery lay in direct proportion to its freedom or its inhibitions and, along the same lines, of the sacrifice or selfishness of its ancestors.

Night favors belief, and the imagination peoples the air with specters.

Man understood in the end what man is. He renounces the analysis of God, penetrating the impalpable, in which he has not seen, to give laws to the phantasms of his brain. Man understands that his inheritance is the greater world whose dominion is within his grasp. Tired of useless and presumptuous labor he bows his head and looks about him, and now he sees how our poets are born. Little by little nature's muses open their treasures and start to smile upon us, and lead us far from such labors.