Quotes from Noli Me Tángere

“I have to believe much in God because I have lost my faith in man.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“To be happy does not mean to indulge in foolishness!”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“It is not the criminals who arouse the hatred of others, but the men who are honest.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“Walang maitutugon ang wika sa tanong ng pag-ibig buhat sa isang sulyap na kumikislap o palihim. Sa halip, sumasagot ang ngiti, ang halik, o ang bugtonghininga.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“The example could encourage others who only fear to start.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“Dying people don't need medicine, the ones who remain do.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“People believe that madness is when you don't think as they do, which is why they take me for a madman.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“The righteous man pays the sinner's bill.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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?”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“Maria Clara did not faint, simply because the Filipinos do not know how to faint.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“Night favors belief, and the imagination peoples the air with specters.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“Vice pays for its own freedom.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

“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.”
― José Rizal, quote from Noli Me Tángere

About the author

Popular quotes

“The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“The front door of the Flippant Witch gave a series of loud clicks and swung inward. Renard Lambert, his blue-and-purple finery resembling a plum in the twitching lanterns, practically hurled himself through the open doorway
“Widdershins!” he called loudly, cape flowing behind him, “I—gaaack!” He ducked, barely in time to avoid the carafe that shattered loudly against the wall just behind his head. The tinkling of broken glass, a dangerous entry chime indeed, sounded around him.
“Oh,” Genevieve said, her tone only vaguely contrite. “It's just your friend. Sorry, Renard.”
“Sorry? Sorry?! What the hell were you—ah. Um, hello, ah, Widdershins."
Widdershins, who had lurched to her feet as the door opened, was suddenly and forcibly reminded by Renard's stunned stare that Genevieve had disrobed her in order to get at the rapier wound. Blushing as furiously as a nun in a brothel, she ducked behind her blonde-haired friend and groped desperately for her shirt.
“Didn't mean to take your head off, Renard,” Genevieve said, mainly to distract him. “But you rather startled us.”
“Quite understandable,” the popinjay responded absently, his eyes flickering madly as he fought to locate some safe place to put them.”
― quote from Thief's Covenant

“I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Times and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not placed his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity : "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should you want to learn a thing like that?”
― Philip Roth, quote from My Life as a Man

“time. Every night I’d wake up to her howls. Turtle, who slept at the”
― Judy Blume, quote from Superfudge

“Quentin found it hard not to blame her doctors, and especially her father, for not being open-minded enough to at least consider the possibility that there had been nothing wrong with Diana from the beginning. But they hadn't. Faced with the inexplicable, with experiences and behaviors they didn't understand and were frightened by, they had acted swiftly, with all the supposed knowledge of modern-day medicine, to "fix" her "problems."

Even before she hit puberty, for Christ's sake.

And they had left her only half alive. A pale, colorless, vague, and passionless copy of the Diana she was meant to be.

Christ, no wonder she looked out on the world with wary, suspicious eyes. Finally off all the mind-numbing medications, Diana was clearheaded for the first time since childhood. Truly aware for the first time of the world around her. And not just aware, but painfully alert, with the raw-nerved sensitivity of most psychics.

She knew, now. No matter what she was willing to admit aloud or even consciously, she knew now that she had been kept half alive, less than that. Knew that those she had trusted most had betrayed that trust, even if they had done it in the name of love and concern and with all good intentions. They hadn't kept her safe, they had kept her doped up and compliant. They had sought to hammer away all the sharp, unique edges that made her Diana.

So she could be healthy. Like everybody else.

It had been in her voice when she'd told him, a haunted awareness of all she'd lost.

"I'm thirty-three now. You do the math."

He thought it must have been like waking from a coma or a hazy dream to find that everything that had gone before had not been real. The world had turned, time had moved on... and Diana had lost years.

Years.”
― Kay Hooper, quote from Chill of Fear

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