"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."
"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."
23 likes
Source: Machado de Assis (2015). “Iaiá Garcia”, p.23, University Press of Kentucky
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Machado de Assis
"A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism."
"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."
"We kill time; time buries us."
"There is nothing worse than giving the longest of legs to the smallest of ideas."
"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."