Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 5

Unshed tears leave a deposit on your heart. Eventually they form a crust around it and paralyze it, the way mineral deposits paralyze a washing machine.
Susanna Tamaro
The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.
Namkhai Norbu
Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.
Tiziano Terzani
When I'm in love, I can't stand anyone.
Stefano Benni
Speak gently but look out for your rights.
Christine de Pizan
Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.
Rafael Sabatini
The role of any person in this world is to be themselves without damaging the rest. We are important as long as the rest "is". - Rossana Condoleo
Rossana Condoleo
your soul is sunken in that cowardice that bears down many men, turning their course and resolution by imagined perils, as his own shadow turns the frightened horse.
Dante Alighieri
Faith is God's work within us.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.
Altiero Spinelli
Fine gold is recognized when it is tested.
Leonardo da Vinci
Good Morning! Good Afternoon! Good Night! These are not just mere greetings.They are powerful blessings, setting the best vibration for the day. Hence, whether it is morning, afternoon or night, make sure that you say your greeting right!
Franco Santoro
Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.
Umberto Eco
I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.
Elena Ferrante
Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.
Giuseppe Garibaldi
What was that about?” he asked his voice deep with a bitter distain. I raised an eyebrow at him, “What was what about?”“All that, ‘Are-you-okay?’ and ‘Do-you-want-to-talk-about-it?’ crap.”“I was being nice. You know, that thing you being the total opposite of right now.
Sara Massa
It is also said that the sheep heed the Shepherd, because they know his voice. Is it true that men recognize Christ's call and respond to it? In one sense it must be, for he has said so; yet much in me qualifies the statement. Actually I respond much more readily to the call of 'the others'; I neither really understand Christ's summons nor follow it. Therefore, in order that I may hear, he must not only speak, but also open my ears to his voice. Part of me, the profoundest part, listens to it, but superficial, loud contradiction often overpowers it. The opponents with whom God must struggle in order to win us are not primarily ‘the others,’ but ourselves; we bar his way. The wolf who puts the hireling to flight is not only outside; he is also within. We are the arch-enemy of our own salvation, and the Shepherd must fight first of all with us – for us.
Romano Guardini
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.
Enrico Fermi
When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt
Carlo Rovelli
And I read hundreds and thousands of books, day and night, always awake and always eager to seek health. But in no book I found what I was looking for. Then, shut up in my parents' house, I thought and suffered for hundreds and thousands of hours, always awake and always mindful of the tremendous anxiety of health. But I still have not found what I was looking for.
Giovanni Papini
I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery!]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.
Galileo Galilei
Night is a world lit by itself
Antonio Porchia
The world has come to such a state that one can no longer find anyone who does good.
Girolamo Savonarola
..if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble. In a way, it's like having a blind person teach Art History, isn't it?
Donna Leon
Critique by creating.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Dear girl with the red scarf,Love was never meant to be conquered. You have to surrender to it.Trust me, after all, I am Mr. Universe.
Maria La Serra
Anything and everything made her think about him. He was so much a part of her, embedded in her soul. [Mina and Diego]
Maria Grazia Swan
Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.
Italo Calvino
Some things scratch the surface while others strike at your soul.
Gianna Perada Carini
I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
Federico Fellini
What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?
Carlo Rovelli
Charity is that with which no man is lost, and without which no man is saved.
St. Charles Borromeo
My opinion is a view I hold until... well until I find something that changes it.
Luigi Pirandello
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
Giuseppe Garibaldi
Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other.
Pietro Metastasio
Every attempt to fix eternity is an escape from reality. I will be plaguing my days with moments and minutes. For ever is too far!
Rossana Condoleo
Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I'm a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.
Andrea Camilleri
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound
What remains to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us, God will not do everything himself.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The end of pain we take as happiness.
Giacomo Leopardi
... I believe that he will prosper most whose mode of acting best adapts itself to the character of the times; and conversely that he will be unprosperous, with whose mode of acting the times do not accord.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.” (The Rise of Political Correctness)
Angelo Codevilla
Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.
Fabrizio de André
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.
Elena Ferrante
Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.
Elena Ferrante
If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still."And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.
Dante Alighieri
The bee and the serpent often sip from the selfsame flower.
Pietro Metastasio
God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.
Thomas Aquinas
The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.
Dante Alighieri
Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,while the oppression and the shame still last;not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;so do not wake me, hush! keep your voice down.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.
Italo Calvino
I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti
I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.
Umberto Eco
Love is a great poet its resources are inexhaustible but if the end it has in view is not obtained it feels weary and remains silent.
Giacomo Casanova
The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
Leonardo da Vinci
The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity.
Emilio Gentile
Most people think that love doesn’t stand the test of time – that it is eternal only as long as it lasts – but love is an unquenchable flame. It is only the fires of momentary desire that burn too fast and go out far too quickly without leaving behind a single trace.
Mirella Muffarotto
What did the Romans say? “De gustibus non est disputandum”: It is worthless to discuss personal taste. It is called 'personal' for a reason.
Massimo Marino