Quotes by Italian Authors

I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.
Italo Calvino
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
The longer you remain in Rome,' said [Cardinal] S.C., ‘the smaller you will find it.
Giacomo Casanova
When you see the Statue of Liberty, you will be in America.
Antonio Russo
Parisians take their work quite seriously, but they take their enjoyment of the little moments just as seriously. Sometimes sitting in a café with close friends or family and enjoying a shared plate of macarons is just as important as sitting in an office working. You know, some Parisians start their morning with a mug of hot chocolate.Really? Emilia asked, taking a fourth and fifth sip.The chocolate is like medicine to take away your troubles and help you see that life is sweet.
Giada De Laurentiis
It's pronounced wee but spelled O-U-I. It's all you'll want to say when you're sitting at one of the thousands of little cafes that line the streets and you're looking at a menu full of foods you just want to eat for days. And then you wake up early, and the sun is rising in shades of pink over the white buildings as you make your way through the sleepy streets until you're upon the fresh markets!
Giada De Laurentiis
You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
Umberto Eco
Freedom is that which comes from knowledge, the freedom that comes from curiosity, the freedom that comes from the times when the first man did not refuse to look into a telescope and discovered other planets, the freedom that comes from those who tried relentlessly when all others said it was impossible. It is in this freedom that deviance has its roots.
Massimo Marino
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
As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and for love, when seen from the place where your staringeyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s thatI think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anythingchange? Nothing. No other days exist but these of oursbefore the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayit be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of whatI am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope youspent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in thebox. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.
Italo Calvino
Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.
Italo Calvino
In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock along the walls."Man blessed by heaven," he asked me, stopping, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?""May the gods accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognise the illustrious city of Cecilia?""Bear with me," that man answered. "I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.""I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognise only cities and cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every stone and clump.
Italo Calvino
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
Nicola Chiaromonte
Anxiety never yet successfully bridged any chasm.
Giovanni Ruffini
Come follow me and leave the world to its babblings.
Dante Alighieri
But it does move.
Galileo
The world is a beautiful book but of little use to him who cannot read it.
Carlo Goldoni
There can be no substitute for work neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it.
Maria Montessori
God sells us all things at the price of labor.
Leonardo da Vinci
Work means so many things! So many! Among other things work also means freedom. ... Without it even the miracle of love is only a cruel deception.
Eleonora Duse
It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.
Federico Fellini
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
The only joy in the world is to begin.
Cesare Pavese
No woman marries for money they are all clever enough before marrying a millionaire to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese
If you laid every economist in the country end to end you would still not reach a conclusion.
Salvadore Nasello
Where the willingness is great the difficulties cannot be great.
Niccolò Machiavelli
This free-will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey and make the most of it.
Ugo Betti
Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion.
Niccolò Machiavelli
With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination.
Oriana Fallaci
Virtue is health vice is sickness.
Petrarch
You know what I think about violence. For me it is profoundly moral -more moral than compromises and transactions.
Benito Mussolini
Trifles make perfection - and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo
From a little spark may burst a mighty flame.
Dante Alighieri
Start by doing what's necessary then what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
Saint Francis of Assisi
We must not wish anything other than what happens from moment to moment all the while however exercising ourselves in goodness.
Saint Catherine of Genoa
We do not remember days we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
Who cares about great marks left behind? We have one life.... Just one. Our life. We have nothing else.
Ugo Betti
To relinquish a present good through apprehension of a future evil is in most instances unwise ... from a fear which may afterwards turn out groundless you lost the good that lay within your grasp.
Francesco Guicciardini
You cannot teach a man anything you can only help him to find it within himself.
Galileo
If any pilgrim monk come from distant parts with wish as a guest to dwell in the monastery and will be content with the customs which he finds in the place and does not perchance by his lavishness disturb the monastery but is simply content with what he finds he shall be received for as long as he desires. If indeed he find fault with anything or expose it reasonably and with the humility of charity the Abbott shall discuss it prudently lest perchance God had sent him for this very thing. But if he have been found gossipy and contumacious in the time of his sojourn as guest not only ought he not be joined to the body of the monastery but also it shall be said to him honestly that he must depart. If he does not go let two stout monks in the name of God explain the matter to him.
Saint Benedict
To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.
Oriana Fallaci
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
Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other.
Pietro Metastasio
Ambassadors are the eye and ear of states.
Francesco Guicciardini
Whatever people may say the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis the former know how to act the latter become uncouth brutes.
Cesare Pavese
These monstrous views ... these venomous teachings.
Pope Leo XIII
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci
Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear the same self-doubts ... and I have only one source on which I can draw because it comes from within me.
Federico Fellini
As far as beauty is concerned in order to be confident we must accept that the way we look and feel is our own responsibility.
Sophia Loren
Only those means of security are good are certain are lasting that depend on yourself and your own vigor.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am.
Oriana Fallaci
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
I am indeed a king because I know how to rule myself.
Pietro Aretino
Faith in oneself ... is the best and safest course.
Michelangelo
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind your talents the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source you will truly have defeated age.
Sophia Loren
Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which from time to time reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
Luigi Pirandello
There is always a certain peace in being what one is in being that completely.
Ugo Betti
The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese
Praise the sea on shore remain.
John Florio