Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 11

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
Through me you go to the grief wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Surrender as you enter, every hope you have.
Dante Alighieri
Through me is the way to the city of woe. Through me is the way to sorrow eternal. Through me is the way to the lost below. Justice moved my architect supernal. I was constructed by divine power,supreme wisdom, and love primordial. Before me no created things were. Save those eternal, and eternal I abide. Abandon all hope, you who enter.
Dante Alighieri
You did thirst for blood, and with blood I fill you
Dante Alighieri
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
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
To understand antiquity’s idea of man, we must examine its gods and heroes, myths and legends. In these we find the classical prototype of genuine man. ... the will to greatness, wealth, power and fame. Anything opposed to it falls short of the authentically human. ...What a world of difference between this conception and that to which Christ has led us! ...Jesus’ friends are in no way remarkable for their talent or character. He who considers the apostles or disciples great from a human or religious point of view raises the suspicion that he is unacquainted with true greatness. Moreover, he is confusing standards, for the apostle and disciple have nothing to do with such greatness. Their uniqueness consists of their being sent, of their God-given role of pillars for the coming salvation.
Romano Guardini
poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
Leonardo da Vinci
There is no greater sorrowthan thinking back upon a happy timein misery--
Dante Alighieri
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
Dante Alighieri
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes — as it is already to a large extent — no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a “free-range” warren but a “battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.
Italo Calvino
Revenge hardly mends anything. The son of a bitch you want to crush does not exist. The son of a bitch is your own self.
E.E. Giorgi
There are days I long to disappear in the wild, go back to the predator life I was meant to have. Kill the prey or be killed: it’s in my genes.A chimera, that's what I am. And this is my story.
E.E. Giorgi
The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.
Umberto Eco
Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.
Benito Mussolini
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
Democracy is in conflict with individual freedom.
Bruno Leoni
The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.
Umberto Eco
Margherita Margheritone put the pot of water on the fire and the Wicked Witch emptied the sack into it and the little wash-bear jumped out and started biting both of them, went down into the yard and started eating the hens, and threw all the rubbish into the air.
Niccolò Ammaniti
In Italy we have not a Common law legal system, we have a stupid one instead!
Carl William Brown
With you it is always the law, never equity.
Rafael Sabatini
The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation.
Piero Scaruffi
Pictures put you in front of a reality that most of the times you don't want to see, don't want to know about, don't want to get involved.
Oliviero Toscani
All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
Namkhai Norbu
Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun. Nirvana is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering.When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun. The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again.
Namkhai Norbu
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
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
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
Without books no one can be a good teacher nor even a good student of this art.
Fiore Dei Liberi
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
I’d do anything for her if she really wanted me to. I would even walk away from the chance of a lifetime if she asked me to... and I could even be happy about it.
Mirella Muffarotto
Give form to your vision. Disregard the fact that it appears to entail efforts. Express what you have inside and communicate it everywhere.
Franco Santoro
True love cannot be found where it does not exist, nor can it be denied where it does
Torquato Tasso
Visions and words go together only when inspirations connects them!
Rossana Condoleo
I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.
Giordano Bruno
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness and Light, Solidity and Color, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
Leonardo da Vinci
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
Umberto Eco
All Mattia saw was a shadow moving toward him. He instinctively closed his eyes and then felt Alice’s hot mouth on his, her tears on his cheek, or maybe they weren’t hers, and finally her hands, so light, holding his head still and catching all his thoughts and imprisoning them there, in the space that no longer existed between them.
Paolo Giordano
The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.
Amadeo Bordiga
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
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
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
Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.
Catherine of Siena
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
Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.
Galileo Galilei
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
From the deepest silence between us arose uncertain, utterly vague and, as it were, whispered varieties on the theme ‘smile’.
Nicola Lecca
Keep in Mind to be Kind.
A. Volta
Religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life
Elena Ferrante
The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.
Umberto Eco
That's what lay behind the feud under way in the Republic: a battle between different noble family factions in a fight for power. Serving this side or the other was of no interest to Mathias. But the consequences of a Venice under the Pope's direct control weren't at all to his liking. His beloved books would be burned by ignorant, avid priests. Men like Malachia would win.It was the same old struggle. The same fight Gheorg had chosen, the same fight that might take him to Wittenberg. But he wouldn't clear the way for Alexander VI. With what little strength he possessed, even though he was nothing more than a pawn of a chessboard, that extended farther then he could see, Mathias would help those in power smash what had all the makings of a major plot, one designed to overturn the government in power in La Serenissima. And these thoughts allowed the monk to find the first answer to the many question with which he still felt burdened.He and the Borgias did NOT share the same Church.
Riccardo Bruni
And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.
Donna Leon
Most people — however much they might deny it — had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.
Donna Leon
The return we reap from generous actions is not always evident.
Francesco Guicciardini
The inspector sat down on a stair, fired up a cigarette, and entered an immobility contest with a lizard.
Andrea Camilleri
Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.
Paolo Giordano
To love can mean 'to love oneself,' and often love is no more than a juxtaposition of two solitudes.
Pope Paul VI
Reading is solitude.
Italo Calvino
Near me nothing but distances.
Antonio Porchia
In any love-story there are usually two stages or phases. There is the initial stage, where love is expressed by the giving of gifts, especially the gift of self. Then there comes a time when it is no longer enough to give gifts to the beloved, but one has to be ready to suffer for her or for him. Only then can it be seen whether the love is real. In the story of a vocation to consecrated virginity there are also usually two stages. There is the initial stage of the vocation, when, spurred on by grace and attracted by the ideal, one joyfully and enthusiastically says, "Yes, Lord, here I am!" Then comes the time of solitude of heart, of weariness, of crisis, when, in order to maintain that "Yes," one has to die
Raniero Cantalamessa