Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 17

Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).
Franco Bifo Berardi
We have the resources to allow everybody to live with dignity,; we have the technology to do it; what we don't have is yet another excuse!
Adriano Bulla
...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 time we need in order to heal our wounds and finally manifest our deepest dreams is only as long as the gap between two thoughts. These are thoughts in polarity, such as separation and unity, conflict and peace, misery and joy, hate and love, etc. Since as human beings we are all capable of experiencing both thoughts, the only skill we need to develop involves mastering the GAP.
Franco Santoro
Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously "born" in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.
Antonio Gramsci
Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.
Tiziano Terzani
The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.
Giacomo Casanova
[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.
Claudio Magris
To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.
Claudio Magris
There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.
Claudio Magris
When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!
Barbara Conelli
Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have.
Italo Calvino
Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.
Antonio Porchia
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
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
Cesare Pavese
I have my own peculiar yardstick for measuring a man: Does he have the courage to cry in a moment of grief? Does he have the compassion not to hunt an animal? In his relationship with a woman, is he gentle? Real manliness is nurtured in kindness and gentleness, which I associate with intelligence, comprehension, tolerance, justice, education, and high morality. If only men realized how easy it is to open a woman's heart with kindness, and how many women close their hearts to the assaults of the Don Juans.
Sophia Loren
For it is in giving that we receive.
Francis of Assisi
He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.
Dante Alighieri
Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.
Piero Gheddo
Not only in antiquity but in our own times also laws have been passed...to secure good conditions for workers; so it is right that the art of medicine should contribute its portion for the benefit and relief of those for whom the law has shown such foresight...[We] ought to show peculiar zeal...in taking precautions for their safety. I for one have done all that lay in my power, and have not thought it beneath me to step into workshops of the meaner sort now and again and study the obscure operations of mechanical arts.
Bernardino Ramazzini
The heart of a Christian, who believes and feels, cannot pass the hardships and deprivations of the poor without helping them.
Louis Guanella
Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...
Primo Levi
If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.
Primo Levi
People eat meat and think they will become strong as an ox, forgetting that the ox eats grass.
Pino Caruso
To know Christ entails accepting his will as norm. When we feel this we draw back, startled for it means the cross. The it is better to say honestly: “I can’t yet,” than to mouth pious phrases. Slow there with the large words “self-suffender,” and “sacrifice.” It is better to admit our weakness and ask him to teach us strength.
Romano Guardini
Wherefore they understood the Holy Scripture rather literally than with understanding, and taste only the letter of it, still desiring many other books; and they get not to the marrow of it, because they have deprived themselves of the light, with which is found and expounded the Scripture; and they are annoyed and murmur, because they find much in it that appears to them gross and idiotic. And, nevertheless, they appear to be much illuminated in their knowledge of Scripture, as if they had studied it for long; and this is not remarkable, because they have of course the natural light from whence proceeds science. But because they have lost the supernatural light, infused by grace, they neither see nor know My Goodness, nor the grace of My servants. Wherefore, I saw to thee, that it is much better to go for counsel for the salvation of the soul, to a holy and upright conscience, than to a proud lettered man, learned in much science, because such a one can only offer what he has himself, and, because of his darkness, it may appear to thee, that, from what he says, the Scriptures offer darkness. The contrary wilt thou find with My servants, because they offer the light that is in them, with hunger and desire for the soul's salvation. This I have told thee, my sweetest daughter, that thou mightiest know the perfection of this unitive state, when the eye of the intellect is ravished by the fire of My charity, in which charity it receives the supernatural light. With this light the souls in the unitive state love Me, because love follows the intellect, and the more it knows the more can't it love. Thus the one feeds the other, and, with this light, they both arrive at the Eternal Vision of Me, where they see and taste Me, in Truth, the soul being separated from the body, as I told thee when I spoke to thee of the blissfulness that the soul received in Me. This state is most excellent, when the soul, being yet in the mortal body, tastes bliss with the immortals, and ofttimes she arrives at so great a union that she scarcely knows whether she be in the body or out of it; and tastes the earnest -money of Eternal Life, both because she is united with Me, and because her will is dead in Christ, by which death her union was made with Me, and in no other way could she perfectly have done so. Therefore do they taste life eternal deprived of the hell of their own will, which gives to man the earnest-money of damnation, if he yield to it.
Catherine of Siena
As for those who state that it is thanks to a woman, the lady Eve, that man was expelled from paradise, my answer to them would be that man has gained far more through Mary than he ever lost through Eve.
Christine de Pizan
Forthwith I crush this acid lemonFreeing myself of the malefic venomHither I let thee rottenLet my curse be forgotten.
Camilla Isley
The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.
Italo Calvino
Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life.
Iginio Ugo Tarchetti
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
Elena Ferrante
These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.
Francesca Marciano
Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.
Primo Levi
But that day it was raining, and since they couldn't very well sit on the rooftop in the rain to watch the flotilla parade, they stayed in the little room that led to the roof. It had just one tiny window through which the gray light of day filtered in. They sat on the floor, and Lorenzo's senses were aroused by the sound of the rain falling outside, the musky smell of his own body, and the fragrant scent of Caterina's hair. A single blonde strand wound down her slim neck.They kissed, taking off their rain-washed summer clothes so that their bodies pressed, naked, against one another. Long, delicate lovemaking. Caresses, kisses, shivers, and sighs of delight.Lorenzo would have gladly spend the rest of his life preserved in that single moment, as if in amber, abandoning reality to live in the memory of that one single day.
Riccardo Bruni
The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.
Primo Levi
He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.
Giacomo Leopardi
I can't say why some memories float and other sink.
Francesca Marciano
I think part of me doesn't want to remember him, for fear of missing him too much.
Francesca Marciano
The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.
Andrea Camilleri
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.
Giorgio Bassani
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten
Cesare Pavese
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
He kissed and held her like it was the last time, but then again, he always did that, because there had always been that possibility of him losing her.
Daniele Lanzarotta
I’m sure I’d remember if we’d met. It doesn’t happen every day to witness perfection on Earth.
Monica La Porta
It is not the dream of what you're feeling laziness, if not, the sleep of exhaustion.
Edmondo de Amicis
Life is a relentless expulsion from where we come from and an ongoing deportation to alien realms. We are in exile and our greatest dream is to return to the lost land. It is the greatest dream because no matter how long our exile is going to last, the dream will remain. It is the greatest dream because when we finally care only for this dream, then our exile will be over.
Franco Santoro
The web is an opportunity for those who understand that the web is a threat.
Massimo Moruzzi
As Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines succinctly put it, 'Strategy, overdone; doing stuff, underdone'.
Carlo Ancelotti
Gentlemen do not carry a cane or a hat? No gloves?”“Gentleman may still wear them, but I’m afraid the problem is that there aren’t many left.
Camilla Isley
...he's just so out-of-this-world. They don't make them like that anymore.
Camilla Isley
Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy, or one with less heart than I have!
Carlo Collodi
You'll understand me when you're older. Then you'll see how men can blind you. And I mean blind you. To the point that you're no longer yourself.
Francesca Marciano
Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.
Donna Leon
I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men -- although the sum total of men's learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.
Girolamo Cardano
I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.
Elena Ferrante
Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
Francesco Guicciardini
…Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there…
Italo Calvino