Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 18

...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.
Ettore Scola
Reality can be entered through the main door or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.
Gianni Rodari
There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ‘to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.
Umberto Eco
Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.
Maria Montessori
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
Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.
Vittorio Alfieri
We can leave the rat race to rodents... but I suspect that even they wouldn't like it
Adriano Bulla
From that moment our love became sad, and sadness is a disease which gives the death-blow to affection.
Giacomo Casanova
For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers ; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyse it, just as if happiness were his right.
Luigi Pirandello
...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.
Elena Ferrante
I gave up the unequal struggle against what appeared to be in my fate, indeed, I welcomed it with more affection. As one embraces a foe one can't defeat and I felt liberated.
Alberto Moravia
There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.
Dante Alighieri
Here sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation echoed throughout the starless air of Hell;at first these sounds resounding made me weep:tongues confused, a language strained in anguishwith cadences of anger, shrill outcriesand raucous groans that joined with sounds of hands,raising a whirling storm that turns itselfforever through that air of endless black,like grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows.And I, in the midst of all this circling horror,began, "Teacher, what are these sounds I hear?What souls are these so overwhelmed by grief?"And he to me: "This wretched state of beingis the fate of those sad souls who lived a lifebut lived it with no blame and with no praise.They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angelsneither faithful nor unfaithful to their God,who undecided stood but for themselves.Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out,but even Hell itself would not receive them,for fear the damned might glory over them."And I. "Master, what torments do they sufferthat force them to lament so bitterly?"He answered: "I will tell you in few words:these wretches have no hope of truly dying,and this blind life they lead is so abjectit makes them envy every other fate.The world will not record their having been there;Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from them.Let's not discuss them; look and pass them by...
Dante Alighieri
Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is.
Franco Santoro
The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.
Primo Levi
Every day my anxiety is higher,every day the grief more mortal.Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…
Pier Paolo Pasolini
And what will bow your shoulders downwill be the vicious and worthless company with whom you will fall into this abyss.
Dante Alighieri
At times life orchestrates a very efficent, yet rather painful, modality to allow us to release grievances and judgements towards some people. It consists in slowly setting the stage for us to be in the same circumstances, which eventually lead us to behave exactly like those people.Each time we express hard judgments regarding what is wrong with others, a complex and long series of events is activated till we reach the moment when we can see our own finger pointing against us.There is also another way, the most efficent and painless, which does not require any complexity and long orchestration, for it simply takes place in the present. It consists in abstaining right from the beginning from any judgement towards others.
Franco Santoro
Between an action and reaction, between a gesture and its consequences, everybody agrees that there is an exact relationship, but not necessarily a proportionate one.
Filippo Bologna
What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.
Elena Ferrante
A benefit of friendship is knowing whom to tell secrets to.
Alessandro Manzoni
Friendship makes you feel as one with your friend.
Thomas Aquinas
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
Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.
Baldassarre Castiglione
If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only becasue it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.
Giordano Bruno
The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights.
Giotto di Bondone
The most striking impression was that of an overwhelming bright light. I had seen under similar conditions the explosion of a large amount—100 tons—of normal explosives in the April test, and I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore. Our eyes were accommodated to darkness, and thus even if the sudden light had been only normal daylight it would have appeared to us much brighter than usual, but we know from measurements that the flash of the bomb was many times brighter than the sun. In a fraction of a second, at our distance, one received enough light to produce a sunburn. I was near Fermi at the time of the explosion, but I do not remember what we said, if anything. I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.
Emilio Segrè
The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark.
Leonardo da Vinci
Light is impressionism.
Gae Aulenti
The journey to the light starts with a candle. Once it's lit, darkness has gone forever.
Adriano Bulla
The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.
Primo Levi
It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.
Italo Calvino
What happens to the drop of wineThat you pour into the sea?Does it remain itself, unchanged?It is as if it never existed.So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in,It is united with Truth,Its old nature fades away,It is no longer master of itself.The soul wills and yet does not will:Its will belongs to Another.It has eyes only for this beauty;It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont--It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.The base of this highest of peaksIs founded on nichil,Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord.
Jacopone da Todi
No knife cuts as swiftly, deeply and precisely as the blade of the Beloved.
Tiziana Stupia
Consistent happiness is an art - An art that involves taking and maintaining control of which thoughts you give attention to and which thoughts you disregard
Gennaro Moccia
Rome is not outside me, but inside me.. Her feverish sweetness, her tragic countryside, her own beauty and harmony, all these are mine, for my thought and my work.
Amedeo Modigliani
Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices!...
Carlo Collodi
A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
To learn what I know I have burned more midnight oil than you have drunk wine.
Tommaso Campanella
I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears.After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.
Erri De Luca
Learning is my sole delight.
Francesco Petrarca
You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.
Rafael Sabatini
Learning never exhausts the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci
Whenever she walked along the streets of Manhattan, she looked at all the different faces coming toward her and, despite their different features and colors, she regarded them all as Americans.
Francesca Marciano
One the advantages about this life is that you can hate someone without knowing him
Alessandro Manzoni
Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.
Giacomo Casanova
God loves his creatures, and he loves each one the more, the more it shares his own goodness, which is the first and primary object of his love. Therefore he wants the desires of his rational creatures to be fulfilled because they share most perfectly of all creatures the goodness of god.And his will is an accomplisher of things because he is the cause of things by his will. So it belongs to the divine goodness to fulfill the desires of rational creatures which are put to him in prayer.
Thomas Aquinas
Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding. Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion.
Thomas Aquinas
Give us, O Lord, a steadfast heart, which no unworthy affection may drag downwards; give us an unconquered heart, which no tribulation can wear out; give us an upright heart, which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside. Bestow upon us also, O Lord our God, understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and a faithfulness that may finally embrace you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Thomas Aquinas
We should seek not so much to pray but to become prayer.
Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;where there is hatred, let me sow love;when there is injury, pardon;where there is doubt, faith;where there is despair, hope;where there is darkness, light;and where there is sadness, joy.Grant that I may not so much seekto be consoled as to console;to be understood, as to understand,to be loved as to love;for it is in giving that we receive,it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,and it is in dying [to ourselves] that we are born to eternal life.
Francis of Assisi
At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddle it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them into depressives, and would still have some left over. Because he no longer knew what to do with so much sadness. And sometimes he didn't even know what to do with himself.
Filippo Bologna
Bad thoughts can be dangerous if left to simmer and weaken the heart slowly and invisibly. Like termites that destroy the beams of a house, secretly, in the dark until it's too late and everything collapses.
Massimo Marino
Together we proceeded on our way towards catastrophe. [Depressed lawyer and his unsuspecting clients.]
Gianrico Carofiglio
Life to be bearable must be lived intensely. Through it a continuous stream of emotion passes. Though that emotion is ever changing as flowing water changes, it at least bears us along on a current that gives the illusion of continuity and permanence. But analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soul.
Giovanni Papini
Depression is a physical illness, like bleeding from a wound that won’t close. You cannot fix it, it doesn’t heal.
Gaia B. Amman
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
Giorgio Agamben
To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.
Italo Calvino
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
Italo Calvino
He would like to be capable of writing as he thinks, quickly, without effort, the word as agile and dynamic as athletes in a race, jumping over hurdles, one after the other, go, go, go, flying towards the finishing post, faster than the disgust limping behind him.
Filippo Bologna