Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 2

... Whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to live in freedom and does no destroy it, may reckon on being destroyed by it. For if it should rebel, it can always screen itself under the name of liberty and its ancient laws, which no length of time, nor any benefit conferred will ever cause it to forget; and do what you will, and take what care you may, unless the inhabitants be scattered and dispersed, this name, and the old order of things, will never cease to be remembered...
Niccolò Machiavelli
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
The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.
Leonardo da Vinci
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
Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.
Sophia Loren
Keep a clear eye toward life's end. Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God's creature. What you are in his sight is what you are and nothing more. Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing that you have received...but only what you have given; a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.
Francis of Assisi
I am chained to the earth to pay for freedom of my eyes.
Antonio Porchia
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
Yet through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.
Thomas Aquinas
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
To say that nothing is true is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile and that we must be the shepherds of our civilization. To say that everything is permitted is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious of tragic.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze
When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.
Alberto Moravia
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
He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.
Giulio Tononi
Publicity is the soul of stupidity, but we must not forget that we live in a stupid universe, so publicity is the engine of our world.
Carl William Brown
When one opens a book, one should also open one's mind.
Adriano Bulla
Behold those times re-created bythe brutal power of sunlit images,the light of life’s tragedy.The walls of the trial, the fieldof the firing squad; and the distantghost of Rome’s suburbs in a ring,gleaming white in naked light.Gunshots: our death, our survival.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.
Rafael Sabatini
She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.
Donna Leon
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
It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.
Italo Calvino
The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.
Alberto Cairo
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
Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always
Dante Alighieri
The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.
Pitigrilli
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
For you know that any evil spoken of women so generally only hurts those who say it, not women themselves.
Christine de Pizan
Keep in Mind to be Kind.
A. Volta
Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace
Giacomo Leopardi
No ideology is worth a Human life.
Adriano Bulla
The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights.
Giotto di Bondone
At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, "completes what nature left unfinished.
Sophia Loren
The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.
Thomas Aquinas
When we do something we like, we are not only happy. We are also very strong!
Rossana Condoleo
It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence the loneliness of life.
Dino Buzzati
I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.
Elena Ferrante
Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.
Catherine of Siena
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
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.
Italo Calvino
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino
The greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hits.
Michaelangelo
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Umberto Eco
Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.
Umberto Eco
I conclude therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients.
Pitigrilli
She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings.
Elena Ferrante
Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices!...
Carlo Collodi
On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out.
Erri De Luca
All he did all afternoon was calculate again and again how many hours of study time he was losing. Thinking about it now, he felt stupid, as we all do when we remember all the time we waste wishing we were somewhere else.
Paolo Giordano
Feet on the ground, head in the clouds. That's how giants walk.
Andrea Pomelli
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci
Our body is not made of iron. Our strength is not that of stone. Live and hope in the Lord and let your service be according to reason.
Saint Clare of Assisi
When I was very young I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. Believe me never since have I wasted any more time on tobacco.
Arturo Toscanini
But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong.
Umberto Eco
…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
Como siempre, la consideración de su muerte lo serenaba tanto como lo turbaba la muerte de los demás. Tal vez porque, a fin de cuentas, su muerte era el final del mundo.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Are you scared of me now?” She wanted the truth.“More than ever.” He had lowered his guard, putting himself at her mercy, because running away had only served to make him understand that he could never run away from who he was.
Mirella Muffarotto
The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.
Giacomo Casanova
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.
Mario Andretti