Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 15

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
His hair stood upright like porcupine quills.
Giovanni Boccaccio
God tells me how he wants the music played - and you get in his way.
Arturo Toscanini
The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.
Umberto Eco
The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.
Thomas Aquinas
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
Eugenio Montale
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
You really work in those conditions?”She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: “And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?”They didn’t answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn’t tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class.
Elena Ferrante
..it happens in all human affairs that we never seek to escape one mischief without falling into another. Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances.
Umberto Eco
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
From the deepest silence between us arose uncertain, utterly vague and, as it were, whispered varieties on the theme ‘smile’.
Nicola Lecca
A man can do all things if he but wills them.
Leon Battista Alberti
If I saw the gates of hell open and I stood on the brink of the abyss I would not despair I would not lose hope of mercy because I would trust in You my God.
Gemma Galgani
Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose
Leonardo da Vinci
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
This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.
Pope Paul VI
Outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness. This loveliness, indeed, is impressed upon the body in varying degrees as a token by which the soul can be recognized for what it is, just as with trees the beauty of the blossom testifies to the goodness of the fruit.
Baldassarre Castiglione
The world has come to such a state that one can no longer find anyone who does good.
Girolamo Savonarola
All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
Namkhai Norbu
Don't canonize me too soon. I'm perfectly capable of fathering a child.
Francis of Assisi
Haste denies all acts their dignity.
Dante Alighieri
...the Moon, the enemy of poets...("Merchant's Two Sons")
Giambattista Basile
Happiness supports enthusiasm and empowers creativity and initiative.Happiness makes you a better person in your private, family, and work spheres.Happiness keeps you healthy and lets you stick to your plans. Cultivate happiness as the most precious flower in your Garden. - From HAPPY DIVORCE, by Rossana CondoleogardenRossana Condoleo
Rossana Condoleo
Could my proud loneliness be merely an illusion?
Nicola Lecca
Every day my anxiety is higher,every day the grief more mortal.Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…
Pier Paolo Pasolini
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!
Italo Calvino
The reading of good books could soothe human stupidity, the problem is that human stupidity does not like to read.
Carl William Brown
The heart of a Christian, who believes and feels, cannot pass the hardships and deprivations of the poor without helping them.
Louis Guanella
The tear is the language of the soul and the voice of the feeling.
Filippo Pananti
Art is a kind of illness.
Giacomo Puccini
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
Everything seemed less frightening with music, even more so with music I knew by heart. It forced a familiar perspective on the scary unknown that was about to happen.
Gaia B. Amman
Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
Francesco Guicciardini
I think our brain is our soul. I don’t believe in after-life and much less in a sort of buildings-like heaven, where you meet friends, enemies, relatives.
Margherita Hack
We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.
Francis of Assisi
Forthwith I crush this acid lemonFreeing myself of the malefic venomHither I let thee rottenLet my curse be forgotten.
Camilla Isley
We do not remember days we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.
Donna Leon
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
We should seek not so much to pray but to become prayer.
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
Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.
Francis of Assisi
Piddle on me, oh joy.Please, let it flow.Let it slide between your legsLike its rose water.
Maffio Venier
Reality can be entered through the main door or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.
Gianni Rodari
And what we say - that what He willeth is right and what He doth not not will is wrong, is not so to be understood, as if, should God will something inconsistent, it would be right because He willed it. For it does not follow that if God would lie it would be right to lie, but rather that he were not God.
Anselm of Canterbury
He thought back to everything that happened the night before: the hooded men, the chase, his tired heart and weak legs. The very moment in which Mathias realized it was over, when he'd decided to sacrifice his own life in order to save the young man by his side, the monk had found something fundamental inside himself. Deep in his soul, in that hidden place that can only be discovered when a person finds himself poised on the edge of the abyss, gasping what he thought was his last breath, he'd suddenly seen it. Only then did he realize what he held dearest in his heart. Because the last thing to cross his mind, what he'd thought about the moment he'd spun around, prepared to impale himself on the blade, had been a face. No thoughts of God or faith or any other saint. A face. That's when everything became clear.
Riccardo Bruni
Nature [provides] with the excitement of the dance in the interest of the reproduction of the species.
Pitigrilli
Noble blood is an accident of fortune noble actions characterize the great.
Carlo Goldoni
Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.
Elena Ferrante
And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. “ The Prince, XVIII, 5
Niccolò Machiavelli
Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.
Elena Ferrante
He who wishes to be rich within a day, will be hanged within a year.
Leonardo da Vinci
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
The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
Elena Ferrante
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 extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the "I don't know" and "I do not remember" that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.
Primo Levi
And what physicians say about consumptive illnesses is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.
Niccolò Machiavelli
And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.
Donna Leon