Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 24

Never joke about the job of your friend. He/she feeds their family with it and it affects their dignity!
Rossana Condoleo
[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique.
Moderata Fonte
Comparisons are odious.
Archbishop Boiardo
A psychiatrist on the Baader-Meinhof gang: „They seek salvation in a paranoia that blinds them to reality, because they believe everything that surrounds them is an evil machination”. On this point they are not blind. Man cannot, however, look upon the underlying evil and thus cannot escape the punishment of total blindness and corruption meted out to all except inspired seers, and especially those athletes who have overcome evil and been immunized before approaching the vision. For Arjuna the sight of God in his terrifying aspect is cathartic; he remains a warrior and a righteous man. For a Baader, a glimpse behind the veil produces mental upheaval.
Ceronetti
Never do an enemy a small injury.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Light is impressionism.
Gae Aulenti
The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.
Elena Ferrante
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri
... I learn from my mistakes, and falling for you was by far the worst mistake I’ve ever made.
Daniele Lanzarotta
I don't like playing playstation. It seems like a waste of time to me. Reading, instead, leaves something inside you.
Mattia Caldara
Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning
Ezra Pound
It's ironic how those with the most loving arms are the ones who get the most hate.
Sara Deuidicibus
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
Genius is eternal patience.
Michelangelo
Whoever changes one life, changes the whole world.
Michele Amitrani
We become aware of the void as we fill it.
Antonio Porchia
You may have the universe if I may have Italy.
Temistocle Solera
Reality is always richer, more unpredictable than our deductions
Leonardo Sciascia
The End of every maker is himself.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Music is either good or it isn’t, it’s not someone’s opinion.
Toscanini
Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.
Donna Leon
He who does not know how to believe, should not know.
Antonio Porchia
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
Italo Calvino
What is generally known as discipline in traditional schools is not activity, but immobility and silence. It is not discipline, but something that festers inside a child, arousing his rebellious feelings.
Maria Montessori
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci
Denis's love for Mattia had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent.
Paolo Giordano
Unshed tears leave a deposit on your heart. Eventually they form a crust around it and paralyze it, the way mineral deposits paralyze a washing machine.
Susanna Tamaro
... Physicians tell us of hectic fever, that in its beginning it is easy to cure, but hard to recognize; whereas, after a time, not having been detected and treated at the first, it becomes easy to recognize but impossible to cure. And so it is with State affairs.
Niccolò Machiavelli
One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.
Gioacchino Rossini
As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.
Italo Calvino
A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
Sophia Loren
If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.
Ezra Pound
Learning is my sole delight.
Francesco Petrarca
Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
Leonardo da Vinci
Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.
Pope Leo XIII
With you it is always the law, never equity.
Rafael Sabatini
Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.
Italo Calvino
None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.
Luigi Pirandello
Don't try to reach God with your understanding that is impossible. Reach him in love that is possible.
Carlo Carretto
If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved
Umberto Eco
... just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.
Pope John XXIII
Maybe that was what being together with someone really meant. It meant seeing past the idealization you had of them, embracing their flaws and fears, helping them to overcome them, waiting for them if they were not ready. Maybe being in love didn’t mean finding the perfect person, it meant it was worth sticking with an imperfect one.
Gaia B. Amman
Men hesitate less to injure a man who makes himself loved than to injure one who makes himself feared for their love is held by a chain of obligation which because of men's wickedness is broken on every occasion for the sake of selfish profit but their fear is secured by a dread of punishment.
Niccolò Machiavelli
You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.
Galileo Galilei
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is ‘open-minded’ and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.
Julius Evola
From a little spark may burst a mighty flame.
Dante Alighieri
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
The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.
Umberto Eco
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
Leonardo da Vinci
Because you make me want to live. You make me want to grow old with you. You give me hope, and that scares me more than anything else
Daniele Lanzarotta
Quando ouvimos os sinos, ouvimos aquilo que já trazemos em nós mesmos como modelo. Sou da opinião que não se deverá desprezar aquele que olhar atentamente para as manchas da parede, para os carvões sobre a grelha, para as nuvens, ou para a correnteza da água, descobrindo, assim, coisas maravilhosas. O génio do pintor há-de se apossar de todas essas coisas para criar composições diversas: luta de homens e de animais, paisagens, monstros, demónios e outras coisas fantásticas. Tudo, enfim, servirá para engrandecer o artista.
Leonardo da Vinci
There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
In an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Machiavelli
...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
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
Giorgio Agamben
He looked at his watch and knew he had to get going. He wished he could spend forever staring at her, but he was not meant to have that much happiness; he never thought he deserved it. Not after spending centuries as he did.
Daniele Lanzarotta
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino