The name of Gabriel García Márquez is widely known worldwide. We are talking about the author of such well-known works of literature as “One hundred years of solitude” (his most famous work and considered one of the most important written in Spanish), “Love in the time of cholera” or “Chronicle of a death foretold”, great exponents of Hispanic American literature and of the literary movement known as magic realism , as well as one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Throughout his career, this author has reflected on various realities and made various reflections on many vital aspects of our daily lives. That is why in this article we are going to see a series of sentences by Gabriel García Márquez .

50 phrases by Gabriel García Márquez

There are many themes touched by Gabriel García Márquez throughout his work, from aspects such as melancholy, the passing of time or politics. There have also been many interviews with him throughout his life, and different facets of his thought can be observed. Below we will see about fifty of these reflections and thoughts .

1. I love you not for who you are but for who I am when I am with you

Love makes us see the world differently, makes us better as people and makes us feel excited regardless of the characteristics of the person we love.

2. Human beings are not born forever on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life forces them to give birth to themselves over and over again

Life is hard and forces us to learn and continually reinvent ourselves in order to adapt.

3. There will always be people who will hurt you so what you need to do is keep trusting and only be more careful about who you trust twice

Getting hurt doesn’t have to make us stop trusting the rest of the world. It should simply teach us to think more about who we trust.

4. No one should know its meaning until they are a hundred years old

Knowing why we do things or why we are here could be useful, but it would prevent us from making mistakes, from experimenting and learning, from getting our hopes up and, in short, from living.

5. The worst way to miss someone is to sit next to them and know that you can never have them

A phrase that expresses the profound pain suffered by someone whose love is not reciprocated and the longing for something that can never be.

6. I don’t wish success to anyone. What happens to you is what climbers do, they kill themselves to get to the top and when they get there, what do they do? Go down, or try to go down discreetly, with as much dignity as possible

The author clearly expresses the fact that after reaching the summit only the decline remains, unless a new summit is found to be climbed. This is one of those phrases by Gabriel García Márquez in which we can see the inspired way in which the writer mixes creativity and humour.

7. Life is nothing but a continuous succession of opportunities to survive

Throughout our lives we will continually encounter difficulties and obstacles that we must face in order to survive.

8. Remembering is easy for the one with memory. Forgetting is difficult for the one who has a heart

A sentence in which the author reflects on the difficulty of forgetting someone who has mattered to us.

9. Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with their whole being

Each of us has our own vision of the world and of reality, including in that vision the concept of love. This is not something that is the same for everyone, there are different ways of loving .

10. A true friend is one who takes you by the hand and touches your heart

Friendship is another of the concepts that the author values in his work as something fundamental to our existence.

11. A man only has the right to look down on another man when he has to help him up

A phrase that encourages not to underestimate or consider oneself above others.

12. He had lost in waiting the strength of his thighs, the hardness of his breasts, the habit of tenderness, but he kept intact the folly of his heart

This phrase expresses that love has no age: no matter how many years go by and how old we are, we will continue to fall in love.

13. The prolonged captivity, the uncertainty of the world, the habit of obeying had dried up in his heart the seeds of rebellion

If we get used to not expressing what we feel or doing what we want, in the long run we will acquire a passive and conformist attitude that will not allow us to change things.

14. The search for lost things is hampered by routine habits, and that is why it is so hard to find them

Habit and conformity with existing routines can cause us to lose enthusiasm and the desire to explore and eat the world .

15. No adventure of the imagination has more literary value than the most insignificant episode of everyday life

The small details of the day to day are what mark us and give authentic meaning to reality. In spite of everything we can imagine, it is reality or the glimpses of it that make and enrich a great story.

16. Nostalgia, as always, had erased the bad memories and magnified the good ones

A phrase that tells us how we tend to forget the bad things of our past, often making us think of the past as something only positive and magnifying its value in contrast to the time we live in today.

17. To offer friendship to one who seeks love is to give bread to one who is dying of thirst

He who loves cannot change his feelings from one day to the next. Offering him friendship can lead to suffering.

18. No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same

I often assume that rich is the one with money. However, it is much happier and feels really rich who has love, friendship, culture and feels loved and self-fulfilled.

19. Demons are not to be believed even when they tell the truth

A phrase that expresses the need for caution in the face of the actions of those who seek to take advantage of one, even if they base their actions or words on true elements.

20. Ultimately, literature is nothing more than carpentry. With both you work with reality, a material as hard as wood

The author compares both types of creation, considering them similar as being an art in which to shape reality in order to create.

21. He begged God to grant him at least a moment not to go away without knowing how much he had loved him above the doubts of both of them, and felt an irresistible urge to start life with him again from the beginning, to tell each other everything that was left unsaid, and to make right again whatever they had done wrong in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death

This fragment of one of his works expresses the need to say and do what we think, otherwise we may lose the opportunity to express it forever.

22. The most important thing I learned to do after forty years was to say no when it is no

While we must be flexible, it is also essential to know how to defend our own position and refuse to do what we do not want, in order to develop and be consistent with our own thoughts.

23. Death does not come with old age, but with oblivion

No matter how much our body withers and dies, we only really die when we are no longer remembered.

24. Happiness is not as they say, that it only lasts for a moment and you don’t know you had it until it’s over. The truth is that it lasts as long as love lasts. Because with love, even dying is good

The author shows the importance given to love, a force that allows us to get excited, be strong and live and even die happy.

25. Don’t try so hard, the best things happen when you least expect them

Often, the things we desire do not arise from a ceaseless, strenuous, desperate search but rather appear suddenly in our lives if we are open to them.

26. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it is no longer useful

Wisdom comes with experience, with trial and error. Often we do not possess it precisely at the time when we would need it.

27. There is no medicine that cures what does not cure happiness

Health is not only the absence of illness, but also well-being. To be happy makes us feel good and to be able to support with a positive point of view what life offers us.

28. The ideas are nobody’s

We all share the ability to think and devise, and the contents of thought do not have a single owner. Different people can reach the same conclusions from very different starting points.

29. No place is sadder than an empty bed

This phrase speaks to us of the sadness and pain caused by the longing for someone we loved and have lost.

30. Life is not taught by anyone

We can learn a lot from millions of people, but in the end each one will live his own life in a completely different way from the others. Life is not something that you learn or that someone can be an expert in, but that you have to live it.

31. Actually, the only time in life when I feel like I’m myself is when I’m with my friends

In front of people we really trust one can be who one really is without fear of being attacked or interpreted for it, being really free.

32. The writer writes his book to explain to himself what cannot be explained

Literature is an art in which the person who performs it expresses a part of his interior , showing aspects of which he is often not aware until after having reflected it or of which he cannot find meaning or explanation.

33. No person deserves your tears and whoever deserves them will not make you cry

No matter how much we love someone, if he hurts us intentionally he does not deserve us and we should not allow him to make us suffer.

34. You may be only one person to the world, but to some people you are the world

A beautiful phrase that makes us think that we are all important to someone, no matter how much we are one more for the majority.

35. You don’t eat the illusion,” she said. “You don’t eat it, but you feed it,” replied the colonel.

Fragment of a conversation between two characters from “The Colonel has no one to write to him”, in which they discuss the need to get excited and motivated.

36. Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity

It is in moments of pain and suffering that love becomes more important.

37. I will have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet in my plans

Phrase that expresses the value of hard work , effort and motivation when living.

38. But despite his immense wisdom and mysterious environment, he had a human weight, an earthly condition that kept him entangled in the tiny problems of everyday life

No matter how wise or important someone may be, he or she is still a human being with the same problems and needs as most others.

39. The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and you have to rebuild it every morning before breakfast

Living together and maintaining love in a relationship should not be taken for granted but requires an effort on both sides.

40. Personality change is a daily struggle in which one rebels against one’s own determination to change, and wants to remain oneself

This phrase by Gabriel García Márquez reflects the idea that although it is possible to change one’s way of being, thinking and acting is not simple.

41. The duty of writers is not to preserve language but to open up a path for it in history.

Language is continually evolving and can vary greatly. What is really important is what it expresses.

42.When a newborn baby clenches his father’s finger with his little fist for the first time, he has it trapped forever

The writer reflects the deep meaning and value of the first contact between a parent and child.

43. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

Everything has a beginning and an end. Although it is normal to feel pain before the latter when we are talking about something positive like love, we should be grateful that we were able to live it.

44. The human body is not made for the years one might live

A phrase that expresses that there are thousands of things that we could do, with so many possible experiences to live that it would be difficult to occupy a single life.

45. Things have a life of their own. It’s all a matter of waking up

Every little detail that we experience, being that we know or even object that we interact with can have a great importance in our life and history if we want it to.

46. We have no other world to move to

The author pushes us to take care and be responsible for the world we live in, since it is the only one we have and that those who come after will have.

47. The intellectual creation is the most mysterious and solitary of all human offices

The knowledge and elaboration of new scientific or literary contents requires effort, dedication and a lot of capacity for analysis and reflection, often accompanied by a certain dose of solitude.

48. Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers to tell about it

Our history is not what we live, but the synthesis we make of our life and how we organize, remember and value it.

49. There is a moment when all the obstacles fall down, all the conflicts are put aside, and one comes up with things that one had not dreamed of, and then there is nothing better in life than writing

The author reflects how sometimes the inspiration to create comes suddenly .

50. Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had to remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to see the ice

This sentence is the beginning of the author’s most well-known and important work, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. It reflects the importance of memories, illusions and moments that have marked us throughout our lives until we become who we are.