Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 3

Come let us give a little time to folly ... and even in a melancholy day let us find time for an hour of pleasure.
Saint Bonaventura
The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
Ezra Pound
The fury of confession, at first,then the fury of clarity:It was from you, Death, that such hypocriticalobscure feeling was born! And nowlet them accuse me of every passion,let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed,impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer.You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life,I’m on the stake. I play the card of fireand I win this little, immense goodness of mine.I can do it, for I have suffered you too much!I return to you as an émigré returnsto his own country and rediscovers it:I made a fortune (in the intellect)and I’m happy, as I once was,destitute of any norm,a black rage of poetry in my breast.A crazy old-age youth.Once your joy was confused with terror,it’s true, and now almost with other joy,livid and arid, my passion deluded.Now you really frighten me,for you are truly close to me,part of my angry state, of obscure hunger,of the anxiety almost of a new being.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.
Umberto Eco
Jealousy is a disease, it's like a poison.
Francesca Marciano
From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
Cesare Pavese
This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.
Marcel Danesi
Far graver is it to corrupt the faith that is the life of the soul than to counterfeit the money that sustains temporal life.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
...no one should marvel at the ease with which Alexander [the Great] kept possession of Asia, or at the difficulties which others, like Pyrrhus and many more, had in preserving their conquests. The difference does not arise from the greater or lesser ability of the conqueror, but from dissimilarities in the conquered lands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It doesn't matter, the important thing is to fall asleep caressing the charm of an image. Because the last thing you think of before falling asleep must always be the most beautiful.
Filippo Bologna
Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
Italo Calvino
To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.
Umberto Eco
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
Italo Calvino
Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously "born" in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.
Antonio Gramsci
The longer you remain in Rome,' said [Cardinal] S.C., ‘the smaller you will find it.
Giacomo Casanova
The birds sang in the dustin an elaborate weave, ambiguous,deafening, prey to existencepoor passions lost between the modestsummits of groves of mulberry and elder;and I, like them, in secluded placesreserved for the lost and pure,would wait for evening to fall,for the silent smells of fireand joyous misery to fill the air,for the Angelus bell to toll, veiledin the new peasant mysteryfulfilled in the ancient mystery.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.
Italo Calvino
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Leonardo da Vinci
Content Is King, Distribution is Queen
Andrea Febbraio
Ossa autem alia quae sunt infra basilare non bene ad sensum apparent nisi ossa illa decoquantur, sed propter peccatum dimitiere consuevi. [The bones which are below the os basilare cannot be well seen unless they are removed and boiled, but owing to the sin involved in this I am accustomed to pass them by.]
Mondino de' Liuzzi Mondino dei Luzzi Mundinus de Leuciis
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten
Cesare Pavese
I wish that death had spared me until your library had been complete.
Lorenzo de' Medici
Piddle on me, oh joy.Please, let it flow.Let it slide between your legsLike its rose water.
Maffio Venier
When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.
Antonio Porchia
She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings.
Elena Ferrante
Whenever she walked along the streets of Manhattan, she looked at all the different faces coming toward her and, despite their different features and colors, she regarded them all as Americans.
Francesca Marciano
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci
Remember to give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way
Valentina Giambanco
lies, truth, loveI have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of it's charms.
Giacomo Casanova
If she had looked into his eyes at that very moment she would have seen the inferno that she had thrown him into.
Mirella Muffarotto
When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola. 'Tyromancy, ye know,' remarked the mermaid. 'The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.' Then she pulled her tiny hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers. 'Lackaday!' she moaned. 'Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do!
Michelle Lovric
The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are.
Julius Evola
We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.
Umberto Eco
How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?
Christine de Pizan
Maybe that's what happens with age, I thought. All your life you force yourself to forget people who have hurt you, but as you get older and weaker their memory surfaces again, like a bubble in the water. You have to surrender, because you feel to tired to fight it and push it down again. And maybe, unexpectedly, you find out that instead, of revamping your anger, those memories produce an unexpected sweetness.
Francesca Marciano
Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side…
Italo Calvino
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients.
Pitigrilli
Fear is secured by a dread of punishment.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
Umberto Eco
Any time not spent on love is wasted.
Torquato Tasso
They weren't smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other's, through their arms and fingers. . . . There was a shared space between their bodies, the confines of which were not well delineated, from which nothing seemed to be missing and in which the air seemed motionless, undisturbed.
Paolo Giordano
Why do you accept being treated like an inmate?
Antonio Negri
When you see the Statue of Liberty, you will be in America.
Antonio Russo
I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.
Giovanni Arduino
Are you afraid a demon has escaped Hell in order to descend upon the Venetians?""I think there are a few who'd deserve it, but I'm also a man of science, and I believe that we all carry our own private infernos inside ourselves."-Conversation between Majid and Mathias
Riccardo Bruni
Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It’s a good sentence, she’ll like it.
Elena Ferrante
We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.
Giacomo Casanova
What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...
Italo Calvino
We must give alms. Charity wins souls and draws them to virtue.
Angela Merici
Unconditional love is the greatest gift of all" ~ The Soul Bearers, by Sylvia Massara
Sylvia Massara
[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.
Christine de Pizan
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal
Cesare Pavese
If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
It’s not God who gave us moral laws, but this doesn’t make them less important
Margherita Hack
Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy, or one with less heart than I have!
Carlo Collodi
Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.
Donna Leon
You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.
Rafael Sabatini
Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.
Erri De Luca