Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 13

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.
Roberto Rossellini
Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.
Umberto Eco
I love those who can smile in trouble...
Leonardo da Vinci
What each man is in Your eyes, thus he is, and no more.
Francis of Assisi
Loving ourselves so much, we are naturally led to enlarge our own merits, to play down our transgressions, to judge others by different standards from those used to judge ourselves. Enlarged merits? They are described by your fellow-writer Trilussa:The little snail of VaingloryWho had crawled up an obeliskLooked at its slimy trail and said:I see I'll leave my mark on History.This is the way we are, dear Twain; even a bit of slime, if it is our own, and because it is our own, makes us boast, gives us a swelled head!
Pope John Paul I
When I am paid a compliment, I must compare myself with the little donkey that carried Christ on Palm Sunday. And I say to myself: If that little creature, hearing the applause of the crowd, had become proud and had begun -- jackass that he was -- to bow his thanks left and right like a prima donna, how much hilarity he would have aroused! Don't act the same!
Pope John Paul I
See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.
Pope John XXIII
the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved
Umberto Eco
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries -old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco
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
NON SI PUÒ SOSTITUIRE QUALCOSA DI UNICO, NON SI PUÒ RIEMPIRE UN ABISSO CHE NON VUOLE ESSERE RIEMPITO, CHE SFUGGE, CONTINUA A SPOSTARSI. CI SI PUÒ SEMPRE ACCONTENTARE, MA CERTE COSE TI MANCHERANNO PER SEMPRE.
Valentina D'Urbano
The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer,the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoonthat is better than a spoon
Umberto Eco
If the Earth were not subject to any change I would consider the Earth a big but useless body in universe, paralyzed...superfluous and unnatural.Those who so exalt incorruptibility, unchangeability and the like, are, I think, reduced to saying such things both because of inordinate desire they have to live for a long time and because of the terror they have of death...they do not realize that if men were immortal, they would have never come into the world.
Galileo Galilei
I've been in love for five hundred million years…
Italo Calvino
When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.
Italo Calvino
One gives way to the temptation, only to rise from it again, afterwards, with a great eagerness to reestablish one's dignity, as if it were a tombstone to place on the grave of one's shame, and a monument to hide and sign the memory of our weaknesses. Everybody's in the same case. Some folks haven't the courage to say certain things, that's all!THE STEP-DAUGHTER: All appear to have the courage to do them though.
Luigi Pirandello
And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
Umberto Eco
But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.
Umberto Eco
Expiating a sin does not mean doing something opposite to wallow in guilt, but to use that same guilt to achieve full knowledge of the sin. The fault lies more not in having committed certain acts, rather in having carried them out without reaching their intimate knowledge. And this leads to committing a wrong again and again.
Massimo Marino
Ossa autem alia quae sunt infra basilare non bene ad sensum apparent nisi ossa illa decoquantur, sed propter peccatum dimitiere consuevi. [The bones which are below the os basilare cannot be well seen unless they are removed and boiled, but owing to the sin involved in this I am accustomed to pass them by.]
Mondino de' Liuzzi Mondino dei Luzzi Mundinus de Leuciis
...Because the sacred fire that lights all nature liveliest of all in its own image glows. All these prerogatives the human creature possesses, and if one of them should fail, he must diminish from his noble stature. Sin only can disenfranchise him, and veil his likeness to the Highest Good; whereby the light in him is lessened and grows pale. Ne'er can he win back dignities so high till the void made by guilt be all filled in with just amends paid for by illicit joy. Now, when your nature as a whole did sin in its first root, it lost these great awards, and lost the Eden of its origin; nor might they be recovered afterwards by any means, as if thou search thou'lt see, except by crossing one of these two fords; either must God, of his sole courtesy, remit, or man must pay with all that's his, the debt of sin in its entirety. Within the Eternal Counsel's deep abyss rivet thine eye, and with a heed as good as thou canst give me, do thou follow this. Man from his finite assets never could make satisfaction; ne'er could he abase him so low, obey thereafter all he would, as he'd by disobedience sought to raise him; and for this cause man might not pay his due himself, nor from the debtor's roll erase him. Needs then must God, by his own ways, renew man's proper life, and reinstate him so; his ways I say - by one, or both of two. And since the doer's actions ever show more gracious as the style of them makes plain the goodness of the heart from which they flow, that most high Goodness which is God was fain - even God, whose impress Heaven and earth display - by all His ways to lift you up again; nor, between final night and primal day, was e'er proceeding so majestical and high, nor shall not be, by either way; for God's self-giving, which made possible that man should raise himself, showed more largesse than if by naked power He'd cancelled all; and every other means would have been less than justice, if it had not pleased God's Son to be humiliate in fleshliness.
Dante Alighieri
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?
Umberto Eco
The American army,” said the Prince of Candia, “has the sweet, warm smell of a blond woman.”“You’re very kind,” said Colonel Jack Hamilton.
Curzio Malaparte
I have never done anything in my life except try to make myself ill when I had my health and try to make myself well when I had lost it. I have been equally and thoroughly successful in both, and today in that particular I enjoy perfect health, which I wish I could ruin again; but age prevents me.
Giacomo Casanova
High justice would in no way be debased if ardent love should cancel instantly the debts these penitents must satisfy.
Dante Alighieri
An unavoidable war is called justice. When brutality is the only option left it is holy
Machiavelli
For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty.
Cesare Beccaria
It is a considerable point in all good legislation to determine exactly the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of a crime. Every reasonable man, everyone, that is, whose ideas have a certain interconnection and whose feelings accord with those of other men, may be a witness. The true measure of his credibility is nothing other than his interest in telling or not telling the truth; for this reason it is frivolous to insist that women are too weak [to be good witnesses], childish to insist that civil death in a condemned man has the same effects as a real death, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous, when they have no interest in lying.
Cesare Beccaria
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity.
Emilio Gentile
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?
Umberto Eco
I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
Primo Levi
Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.
Donna Leon
Are you afraid a demon has escaped Hell in order to descend upon the Venetians?""I think there are a few who'd deserve it, but I'm also a man of science, and I believe that we all carry our own private infernos inside ourselves."-Conversation between Majid and Mathias
Riccardo Bruni
If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature.The rest of your images that associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow - river fire whirlpool volcano - are for me memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.
Italo Calvino
It is a futile and ridiculous struggle—but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.
Rafael Sabatini
People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.
Paolo Giordano
I desire a society which selects its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government itself--whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any class is fatal to the welfare of the whole,
Rafael Sabatini
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
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
I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.
Alberto Moravia
I had fallen out of my secure world, precipitated beyond the territories I had only begun to control so skillfully. What a foolish step to take. What an insane move to make.
Francesca Marciano
...your heart spoke for you. You gave up everything for me.
Camilla Isley
Will there ever come a day when you put yourself first?""No, that day will never come.""You're crazy, my old man.""It will never come because I've finally realized that I want you by my side, now and forever. That I can no longer be just myself, standing alone. I need more."Angelica's eyes filled with tears. She looked like she was fighting to hold them back."You really are crazy."-Conversation between Mathias Munster and Angelica Zanon
Riccardo Bruni
They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
Italo Calvino
From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.
Italo Calvino
The sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
...our brains are minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
Valentino Braitenberg
I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.
Erri De Luca
If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.
Thomas Aquinas
The constant talker will never, or a least rarely, grasp truth. Of course even he must experience some truths, otherwise he could not exist. He does notice certain facts, observe certain relations, draw conclusions and make plans. But he does not yet possess genuine truth, which comes into being only when the essence of an object, the significance of a relaton, and what is valid and eternal in this world reveal themselves. This requires the spacousness, freedom, and pure receptiveness of that inner “clean-swept room” whilch silence alone can create
Romano Guardini
Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace
Giacomo Leopardi
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
Eugenio Montale
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
Leonardo da Vinci
...to give a clear picture of the whole scene of Italian gastronomy.
Anna Del Conte
In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.
Marcella Hazan
Aboard the gondola, Giacomo Foscarini sat facing Mathias. They were crossing the Canal Grande, then they would navigate around San Marco and return. Foscarini loved to travel around Venice this way. They stopped briefly at a mooring near the bridge to the Rialto, and Foscarini had a servant fetch green olives, fresh Piacenza cheese, a few sausages from Modena, and wine that had just been delivered from Crete. The nobleman often dined aboard his gondola, looking out over the city, watching his world. "Seen from this vantage point, Venice doesn't seem like it's in any of its terrible troubles at all magister," said Foscarini.
Riccardo Bruni
One of the very best things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.
Luciano Pavarotti
A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.
Elsa Schiaparelli
[T]he real lie that advertising tells is not so much in what it shows, but in what it leaves out.
Stefano Benni