Jose Rizal (1861 – 1896)
Filipino nationalist, doctor, writer, and polymath whose works and martyred death made him a hero of the Philippine Revolution.
I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land.You who have it to see, welcome it--and forget not those who have fallen during the night!
Is it not sad, I said to my countrymen, that we have to learn from a foreigner about ourselves? Thanks to the German scholars we get accurate information about ourselves, and when everything in our country has been destroyed and we wish to verify the historical correctness of certain facts we shall have to come to Germany to search for these facts, in German museums and books!
He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps..is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains...but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return
Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.
No one has a monopoly of the true God, nor is there a nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator or sole knowledge of His Being.
If Rizal said this, he was echoing Joseph de Maistre's earlier famous observation that "every nation gets the government it deserves."
It breaks immortality's neck
Contemplates crime and therefore halts it;
It humbles barbarous nations
And makes of savages, champions.
He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and a smelly fish.
To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own.
Muse who in the past inspired me to sing of the throes of love:
Go and repose.
What I need is a sword, rivers of gold,
and acrid prose.
Friar! What a strange name. I don't remember having created such a thing! (God speaking to the angel Gabriel)
Law has no skin, reason has no nostrils.
I go where there are no slaves, hangmen or oppressors;
Where faith does not kill; where the one who reigns is God.
Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.
The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.
Oh how beautiful to fall to give you flight,
To die to give you life, to rest under your sky;
And in your enchanted land forever sleep.
The world laughs at another man's pain.
God has made man a cosmopolite. He created seas for ships to glide on, the wind to push them, and the stars to guide them even in darkest night.
I believe in revelation, but not in revelation which each religion claims to possess... but in the living revelation which surrounds us on every side — mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die.
Truth does not need to borrow garments from error. (Also translated as: Truth does not need to borrow garments from falsehood.)