Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 6

There is no worse parent than an unhappy parent!
Rossana Condoleo
The popular element "feels" but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.
Antonio Gramsci
Forthwith I crush this acid lemonFreeing myself of the malefic venomHither I let thee rottenLet my curse be forgotten.
Camilla Isley
Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.
Maria Montessori
These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.
Christine de Pizan
To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.
Italo Calvino
I think part of me doesn't want to remember him, for fear of missing him too much.
Francesca Marciano
Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination.
Aldo Palazzeschi
From the beginning, when something was wrong I've been saying: 'Dilly-ding, dilly-dong, wake up, wake up!' So on Christmas Day I bought for all the players and all the staff a little bell. It was just a joke.
Claudio Ranieri
I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.
Italo Calvino
Work means so many things! So many! Among other things work also means freedom. ... Without it even the miracle of love is only a cruel deception.
Eleonora Duse
It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.
Giacomo Leopardi
Now if only we stopped for a moment to think, it is quite obvious that there is no merit or design or logic in the way luck and talent are distributed in this world. For every man kissed by the sun there are millions in the shade, and there is no valid reason to rule out-or maintain-the possibility that the one is better than the other.
Filippo Bologna
Is it better to be loved or feared?
Niccolò Machiavelli
You never have to suffer because of, or be denatured by, another person, even someone you love.
Rossana Condoleo
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes but few have the gift of penetration.
Machiavelli
I receive Thee ransom of my soul. For love of Thee have I studied and kept vigil toiled preached and taught…
Thomas Aquinas
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
Umberto Eco
A conversation between Adso and William -You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.""And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don't know know why you know that you know what you do?"I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. "Perhaps that's it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.
Umberto Eco
Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may pursue the study of us.
Rafael Sabatini
I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn't have a body, wasn't material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn't have a body or anything.
Donna Leon
The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty.
Elena Ferrante
The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.
Umberto Eco
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
Michelangelo
Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.
Italo Calvino
Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
Giordano Bruno
A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.
Italo Calvino
Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.
Luca Turin (Author) Tania Sanchez (Author)
...I would want to spend it with you. Even if we had thousands of nights, I would want to spend every single one of them with you.
Daniele Lanzarotta
A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
Sophia Loren
Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.
Francis of Assisi
The return we reap from generous actions is not always evident.
Francesco Guicciardini
The man was more temperamental than she was. Not an easy feat. (Mina's view of Diego.)
Maria Grazia Swan
Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.
Galileo Galilei
The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to humans, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.
Italo Calvino
We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.
Umberto Eco
You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom you do everything to gain some right and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it.
Oriana Fallaci
A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.
Thomas Aquinas
There is always a certain peace in being what one is in being that completely. The condemned man has that joy.
Ugo Betti
Art as far as it is able follows nature as a pupil imitates his master thus your art must be as it were God's grandchild.
Dante Alighieri
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Carlo M. Cipolla
The path to paradise begins in hell.
Dante Alighieri
I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils
Leonardo da Vinci
Sometimes, it is not you who finds good ideas when you are seeking them. Instead, good ideas find you in the most unexpected circumstances.
Alberto Cairo
Decide which is the line of conduct that presents the fewest drawbacks and then follow it out as being the best one because one never finds anything perfectly pure and unmixed or exempt from danger.
Niccolò Machiavelli
...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.
Italo Calvino
…I am left with lessthan one drop of my blood that does not tremble.I recognize the the signs of the old flame.
Dante Alighieri
Between an action and reaction, between a gesture and its consequences, everybody agrees that there is an exact relationship, but not necessarily a proportionate one.
Filippo Bologna
They merit more praise who know how to suffer misery than those who temper themselves with contentment.
Pietro Aretino
The sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.
Nicola Abbagnano
Paoletta turned to him with a dark face.“You’d better watch out, Chase. He’s passed over to the evil side.
Stefania Mattana
After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again.
Reinhold Messner
We are the wire God is the current. Our only power is to let the current pass through us.
Carlo Carretto
Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?
Daniele Varè
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
Leonardo da Vinci
Behave like men, and not like witless sheep...
Dante Alighieri
I had a theory; I’m not sure if it was my own but it worked for me. Public spaces, such as streets and subway stations, became inhabitable as I assigned them some value and imprinted an experience on them. If I recited a snatch of Paterson every time I walked along a certain avenue, eventually that avenue would sound like William Carlos Williams. The entrance to the subway at 116th Street was Emily Dickinson’s:Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawnIndicative that suns go down;The notice to the startled grassThat darkness is about to pass.
Valeria Luiselli
The only joy in the world is to begin.
Cesare Pavese