Gabriela Mistral Quotes

#1. What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people,

Gabriela Mistral

#2. Dusk
I feel my heart melting
in the mildness like candles:
my veins are slow oil
and not wine,
and I feel my life fleeing
hushed and gentle like the gazelle.

Gabriela Mistral

#3. All night I have suffered; all night my flesh has trembled to bring forth its gift. The sweat of death is on my forehead; but it is not death, it is life!

Gabriela Mistral

#4. Writing tends to cheer me; it always soothes my spirit and blesses me with the gift of an innocent, tender, childlike day. It is the sensation of having spent a few hours in my homeland, with my customs, free whims, my total freedom.

Gabriela Mistral

#5. I have a faithful joy and a joy that is lost. One is like a rose, the other, a thorn. The one that was stolen I have not lost.

Gabriela Mistral

#6. There is the joy of being healthy and fair, but there is overall the beauty, the immense joy of being useful.

Gabriela Mistral

#7. You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul.

Gabriela Mistral

#8. Let the radiance of my enthusiasms envelop the poor courtyard and the bare classroom. Let my heart be a stronger column and my goodwill purer gold than the columns and gold of rich schools.

Gabriela Mistral

#9. I have all that I lost and I go carrying my childhood like a favorite flower that perfumes my hand.

Gabriela Mistral

#10. Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

Gabriela Mistral

#11. Let the earth look at me, and bless me, for now I am fecund and sacred, like the palms and the furrows.

Gabriela Mistral

#12. My grief and my smile begin in your face, my son.

Gabriela Mistral

#13. For me, religiosity is ... the constant remembrance of the presence of the soul.

Gabriela Mistral

#14. Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe

Gabriela Mistral

#15. Now my belly is as noble as my heart.

Gabriela Mistral

#16. In the secret of night, my prayer climbs like the liana, My prayer is, and I am not. It grows, and I perish. I have only my hard breath, my reason and my madness. I cling to the vine of my prayer. I tend it at the root of the stalk of night.

Gabriela Mistral

#17. Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best.

Gabriela Mistral

#18. The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns.

Gabriela Mistral

#19. At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.

Gabriela Mistral

#20. Now I am nothing but a veil; all my body is a veil beneath which a child sleeps.

Gabriela Mistral

#21. Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.

Gabriela Mistral

#22. Many things can wait. Children cannot. Today their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, their senses are being developed. To them we cannot say "tomorrow." Their name is today.

Gabriela Mistral