Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 7

Controlling the position of one's body and keeping a straight back are not contemplation, but can in fact become an obstacle to contemplation. ...when leaving the body 'uncontrolled' is spoken of, what is meant is simply allowing the body to remain in an authentic, uncorrected condition, in which it is not necessary to modify or improve anything. This is because, since all our attempts at correcting the body come from the reasoning mind, they are all false and artificial.
Namkhai Norbu
Rome is not outside me, but inside me.. Her feverish sweetness, her tragic countryside, her own beauty and harmony, all these are mine, for my thought and my work.
Amedeo Modigliani
How was she created? I'm not sure if you realize this, but it was in God's image. How can anybody dare to speak ill of something which bears such a noble imprint?
Christine de Pizan
Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.
Catherine of Siena
Come follow me and leave the world to its babblings.
Dante Alighieri
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.
Luigi Pirandello
You see me in my most virile moment when you see me doing what I do. When I am directing a special energy comes upon me. ... It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.
Federico Fellini
And St. Francis added: "My dear and beloved Brother, the treasure of blessed poverty is so very precious and divine that we are not worthy to possess it in our vile bodies. For poverty is that heavenly virtue by which all earthy and transitory things are trodden under foot, and by which every obstacle is removed from the soul so that it may freely enter into union with the eternal Lord God. It is also the virtue which makes the soul, while still here on earth, converse with the angels in Heaven. It is she who accompanied Christ on the Cross, was buried with Christ in the Tomb, and with Christ was raised and ascended into Heaven, for even in this life she gives to souls who love her the ability to fly to Heaven, and she alone guards the armor of true humility and charity.
Francis of Assisi
An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.
Alberto Moravia
He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
He turns not back who is bound to a star.
Leonardo da Vinci
Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities. And it must be understood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.
Niccolò Machiavelli
To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido.
Umberto Eco
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
Maria Montessori
The Garden En robe de parade. - SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-mealof a sort of emotional anaemia.And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.In her is the end of breeding.Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.She would like some one to speak to her,And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound
This was the end of the Renaissance. Culture, once beloved and fostered by the papacy, opened the way to dangerous freedom. Then - as now - knowledge, culture, intellectual curiosity became suspect, even dangerous to oppressive regimes: knowledge leading to engaging the mind into reasoning, culture into wanting to know more, intellectual curiosity sharpening the appetite for information, fact. Ignorance was considered safe and political oppression went hand in hand with the congregation of the Inquisition.
Gaia Servadio
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?
Umberto Eco
Don't canonize me too soon. I'm perfectly capable of fathering a child.
Francis of Assisi
As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.
Emilio Segrè
Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.
Federico Fellini
Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking in the sun.
Dacia Maraini
This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.
Erri De Luca
Whatever you dream be aware that it is just a dream.Yet, since there are infinite parallel universes, whatever you dream must be real somewhere in the multiverse.And if it is real, no matter where, then it is not a dream anymore.
Franco Santoro
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.
Giacomo Leopardi
Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!
Carl William Brown
Someone who begins to develop an interest in the teachings can tend to distance themselves from the reality of material things, as if the teachings were something completely apart from daily life. Often, at the bottom of all this, there is an attitude of giving up and running away from one's own problems, with the illusion that one will be able to find something that will miraculously help one to transcend all that. But the teachings are based on the principle of our actual human condition. We have a physical body with all its various limits: each day we have to eat, work, rest, and so on. This is our reality, and we can't ignore it.
Namkhai Norbu
To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself--that is the first duty of the educator.
Maria Montessori
If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only becasue it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.
Giordano Bruno
Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).
Franco Bifo Berardi
To learn what I know I have burned more midnight oil than you have drunk wine.
Tommaso Campanella
But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowledge of the primordial state would be like a lamp, which, when lit in the room, at once causes the darkness to disappear, enlightening everything. In the same way, if one has the presence of the primordial state, one can overcome all hindrances in an instant.
Namkhai Norbu
A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.
Erri De Luca
Realize that everything connects to everything else.
Leonardo da Vinci
Life is a relentless expulsion from where we come from and an ongoing deportation to alien realms. We are in exile and our greatest dream is to return to the lost land. It is the greatest dream because no matter how long our exile is going to last, the dream will remain. It is the greatest dream because when we finally care only for this dream, then our exile will be over.
Franco Santoro
I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.
Italo Calvino
Tacit collaboration by millions whobite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side. (The Rise of Political Correctness)
Angelo Codevilla
I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
Umberto Eco
Oh, let us lose our milk teeth and cut instead the strong teeth of hate and love.
Catherine of Siena
If you want to be saved look the face of your Christ.
Thomas Aquinas
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.
Italo Calvino
Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.
Italo Calvino
Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.
Italo Calvino
...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.
Umberto Eco
Heads will fly all over the place, others will explode by themselves, everyone will have their chance to betray, and those who don't betray will be betrayed.
Sandro Veronesi
Reprove your friend in secret and praise him in public.
Leonardo da Vinci
Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.
Elena Ferrante
Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.
Luigi Pirandello
If God created shadows it was to better emphasise the light.
Pope John XXIII
When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!
Barbara Conelli
Every day He humbles Himself just as He did when from from His heavenly throne into the Virgin's womb; every day He comes to us and lets us see Him in lowliness, when He descends from the bosom of the Father into the hands of the priest at the altar.
Francis of Assisi
Do you not see the Madonna always beside the tabernacle?
Padre Pio
You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
Umberto Eco
What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
Umberto Eco
You will accomplish more by kind words and a courteous manner than by anger or sharp rebuke which should never be used except in necessity.
Angela Merici
We must not wish anything other than what happens from moment to moment all the while however exercising ourselves in goodness.
Saint Catherine of Genoa
Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.
Alberto Moravia