Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 18

The whole world is my family.
Pope John XXIII
Let your projects be independent organisms. They will develop their own beautiful architecture.
Rossana Condoleo
You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.
Luigi Pirandello
An Angel can illuminate the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision and by bringing within his reach some truth which the Angel himself contemplates.
St. Padre Pio
Since God has been pleased to give us the Papacy let us enjoy it.
Pope Leo X
He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.
Dante Alighieri
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
Umberto Eco
For this reason a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.
Niccolò Machiavelli
That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches. Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us. Hold property and external riches with fear; they often leave their possessor scorned and mocked at for having lost them.
Leonardo da Vinci
poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
Leonardo da Vinci
Time: no start no end, the most powerful force in nature, killing more people than 100 atomic bombs, generating thoughts & ideas. Devil&Good
Rossana Condoleo
It is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism. We are Semites spiritually.
Pope Pius XI
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
Umberto Eco
Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
If you want to die happily learn to live if you would live happily learn to die.
Celio Calcagnini
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
Life and art are nothing but associations of ideas and sorrows that nourish our illusory quest for the Holy Grail of human existence. It’s a mystery!
Carl William Brown
One learns not to need by needing.
Antonio Porchia
All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
Umberto Eco
The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.
Andrea Camilleri
He was so drunk that he would have stubbornly denied that he was.
Filippo Bologna
We cam leave the rat race to rodents... but I suspect that even they wouldn't like it.
Adriano Bulla
You’re really a good girl, poor you.
Elena Ferrante
Why did it have to be such a shameful secret? Hadn’t I been potty-trained and taught to chew with my mouth closed? So what was the freaking big deal about having sex? Wasn’t it essential to the survival of our darn, hypocritical species?
Gaia B. Amman
All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions
Leonardo da Vinci
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
There is a period for hope and one for mourning.
Federico Chini
[J]ust the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour. Not only one or two ... but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it would take too long to mention their names – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts, hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realise how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women.
Christine de Pizan
There is always a certain peace in being what one is in being that completely. The condemned man has that joy.
Ugo Betti
(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.
Galileo Galilei
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
Behave like men, and not like witless sheep...
Dante Alighieri
In his madness he became a terrifying actor!
Luigi Pirandello
Sometimes, when you want to help a broken person, your attempts only remind them of their missing pieces.
Gaia B. Amman
I see the pain of miserly love in young people,' I say. 'You don't have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I'm careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It's not like dancing. It's like a stone walkway with a little grass between the cracks. It's strong but I will try to tread carefully and not ruin it. In Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you.
Erri De Luca
The French poet Mallarmé and, after him, Borges, claimed that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book,” and if that’s true, and that even every man is a book, Federico was undoubtedly created by the pen of Keats or some other tormented Romantic poet; while Matteo was pure passion, like Shakespeare’s Romeo: spontaneous, intense, and impetuously real.
Mirella Muffarotto
Every luxury must be paid for and everything is a luxury starting with being in the world.
Cesare Pavese
Our greatest dreams and desires abide in the mental and spiritual realm. In order to transfer them in the physical plane we need to invert subject and object. You will receive from the world what you deeply long to receive the day when you give to the world what you deeply long to receive. Today could be that day.
Franco Santoro
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
I wish that death had spared me until your library had been complete.
Lorenzo de' Medici
And he began, "What chance or destinyhas brought you here before your final day?And who is he who leads your pilgrimage?""Up there in life beneath the quiet starsI lost my way," I answered, "in a valley,before I'd reached the fullness of my age.I turned my shoulders on it yesterday:this soul appeared as I was falling back,and by the road through Hell he leads me home.""Follow your star and you will never fail to find your glorious port," he said to me
Dante Alighieri
To produce a primary [karmic] cause which is potentially capable of having an effect, three things are necessary: intention, the actual action, and then satisfaction.
Namkhai Norbu
Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.
Pope John XXIII
As once I loved you in my mortal flesh, without it now I love you still.
Dante Alighieri
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
You really love to gossip, don't you?” he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.“Yes, I suppose I do,” she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. “You think that's why I love reading novels so much?
Donna Leon
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
...seen from above, landscapes are made up of mountains and watercourses. Just as a transparent model of the human body consists of a framework of bone and a network of arteries, the earth's crust is structured in mountain ridges, river, creeks, and gullies.
Reinhold Messner
Intrinsic values and qualities are age-free. For example, social competencies or a good heart.
Rossana Condoleo
We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.
Primo Levi
He who thinks little errs much…
Leonardo da Vinci
I think part of me doesn't want to remember him, for fear of missing him too much.
Francesca Marciano
It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model ofthinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist".
Primo Levi
The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road.
Angelo Patri
Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the "folklore" of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential.
Antonio Gramsci
Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.
Carl William Brown
Back in time it seemed that having a sister were a tragedy. Instead it is one of the best presents my parents could have ever given me.
Sara Anzellotti
It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
Niccolò Machiavelli
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
I have looked into your eyes with my eyes. I have put my heart near your heart.
Pope John XXIII