Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 28

If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.
Leonardo da Vinci
There is no absolute hate or evil. On the contrary hate or evil are always intimately blended with love and goodness. What causes more hate and evil is paradoxically what tends to be done in the name of love and goodness. Hence, in order to reduce hate and evil we need to be aware of love and goodness, rather than hate and evil.
Franco Santoro
Matteo lived inside her like a memory that paradoxically stopped the pain and which she could never get enough of... because there was, and never would be, anything that was like him. Wherever she went, whatever she did, he was the only thing she truly loved, and which she sadly no longer had.
Mirella Muffarotto
But there is an overarching passion that keeps me alive. That is love, understood as a condition in which I can be an inspiration, make someone feel happy and special, and in turn, feel understood and driven. I function better if I am in that condition of love, and I try to cultivate that daily.
Giovanni Frazzetto
If they lacked the opportunity, the strength of their sprit would have been sapped; if they had lacked ability, the opportunity would have been wasted.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing. Advance with it!
Guiseppe Mazzini
All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.
Leonardo da Vinci
The hidden secret you are hiding is unbearable. The strength to come out is unbelievable. The joy once you come out is incredible. The relief I felt after coming out was life changing.
Sara Deuidicibus
It's absurd how crazy love can make you......but even more absurd how stupid jealousy can make you!
Mirella Muffarotto
There is a thin line that separates life from death, but once it's crossed, it becomes as large as an ocean, and so treacherous that it’s impossible to cross back.
Federico Chini
For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content.
Primo Levi
All the various types of teachings and spiritual paths are related to the different capacities of understanding that different individuals have. There does not exist, from an absolute point of view, any teaching which is more perfect or effective than another. A teaching's value lies solely in the inner awakening which an individual can arrive at through it. If a person benefits from a given teaching, for that person that teaching is the supreme path, because it is suited to his or her nature and capacities. There's no sense in trying to judge it as more or less elevated in relation to other paths to realization.
Namkhai Norbu
Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.
Elena Ferrante
BE OPEN TO new thoughts, to new people, to new principles, to new ideas, to new experiences. "NEW" MAKES US GROW
Rossana Condoleo
I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.
Elena Ferrante
There are no shadows in darkness. Shadows are created by light, and only exist in the presence of light. Refusing to acknowledge our shadow leads us to deny the presence of light in us.
Franco Santoro
...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing…
Primo Levi
Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.
Carlo Rovelli
Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened."Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Umberto Eco
E andando nel sole che abbagliasentire con triste meravigliacom'è tutta la vita e il suo travaglioin questo seguitare una muragliache ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.
Eugenio Montale
Within her presence, I had once been usedto feeling—trembling—wonder, dissolution;but that was long ago. Still, though my soul,now she was veiled, could not see her directly,by way of hidden force that she could move,I felt the mighty power of old love.
Dante Alighieri
Do as we say and not as we do.
Giovanni Boccaccio
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.
Elena Ferrante
Universe doesn't even know that you exist, so relax!
Carl William Brown
In this city [Palermo] . . . it's the souls of the dead who bring presents to the children. . . . We go to the cemetery to ask the dead for toys.
Gianni Riotta
Marika was a book nerd and had a TBR pile taller than her. She was a sucker for YA
Mirella Muffarotto
No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.
Federico Fellini
Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.
Antonio Gramsci
I'm not that man anymore. No one can stay that way too long. That's why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what's behind.
Erri De Luca
If we want know the meaning of existence, we must open a book: over there, in the darkest chapter, there’s a sentence written especially for us.
Pietro Citati
Praised be my Lord, for our sister water.St. Francis of Assisi,Canticle of the Sun
Francis of Assisi
The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
Umberto Eco
I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.
Ignazio Silone
There was a brown substance inside and Chase had no doubt: it was heroin. Only a tiny amount, but very pure." - Cutting Right to the Chase Vol.2
Stefania Mattana
A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational
Thomas Aquinas
Remember to give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way
Valentina Giambanco
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
There is no better manager than a natural born one.
Rossana Condoleo
It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.
Primo Levi
My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.
Miuccia Prada
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
Michelangelo
To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people
Niccolò Machiavelli
We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.
Umberto Eco
The birds sang in the dustin an elaborate weave, ambiguous,deafening, prey to existencepoor passions lost between the modestsummits of groves of mulberry and elder;and I, like them, in secluded placesreserved for the lost and pure,would wait for evening to fall,for the silent smells of fireand joyous misery to fill the air,for the Angelus bell to toll, veiledin the new peasant mysteryfulfilled in the ancient mystery.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Time creates Let time work at your projects.
Rossana Condoleo
The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information.
Umberto Eco
[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.
Christine de Pizan
Once words have been said there is no way to un-say them
Federico Chini
It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them
Italo Calvino
A first kiss is the demarcation line: the same information that a moment ago felt private, all of a suddens seems unfair to withhold. And with that exchange came more.
Francesca Marciano
Mr. Codro's destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing and temporary. It means: not according to natural truth, but according to man's desire and the pretense inspired by his fear of dying and his desire for permanence.
Alberto Savinio
From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other, but because they are difficult to combine, it is far better to be loved than feared if you cannot be both.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.
Giacomo Leopardi
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
Umberto Eco
It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy.
Primo Levi
What I have been asking myself for years is: WHY?!Why kill yourself in the gym? Why try to avoid a little bit of a gut? Why feel bad for eating half of a cake? This doesn’t mean that I killed somebody, plus I left the other half of the cake for tomorrow, I didn’t finish all of it!
Sara Anzellotti
... He who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new... partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event.
Niccolò Machiavelli