Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 27

I conclude therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
Niccolò Machiavelli
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
Niccolò Machiavelli
But confining myself more to the particular, I say that a prince may be seen happy to-day and ruined to-morrow without having shown any change of disposition or character. This, I believe, arises firstly from causes that have already been discussed at length, namely, that the prince who relies entirely upon fortune is lost when it changes. I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful. Because men are seen, in affairs that lead to the end which every man has before him, namely, glory and riches, to get there by various methods; one with caution, another with haste; one by force, another by skill; one by patience, another by its opposite; and each one succeeds in reaching the goal by a different method. One can also see of two cautious men the one attain his end, the other fail; and similarly, two men by different observances are equally successful, the one being cautious, the other impetuous; all this arises from nothing else than whether or not they conform in their methods to the spirit of the times. This follows from what I have said, that two men working differently bring about the same effect, and of two working similarly, one attains his object and the other does not.
Niccolò Machiavelli
If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.
Leonardo da Vinci
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose
Leonardo da Vinci
Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships.
Carlo Rovelli
I could tell you, but you should never trust what someone says about themselves. It’s something you need to see for yourself.
Maria La Serra
...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Italo Calvino
They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people.
Alberto Moravia
From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
Cesare Pavese
The cure to eliminate fake news is that people stop reading 140-character tweets and start reading 600-page books.
Piero Scaruffi
I do not consider my deeds or my knowledge to be a great thing. The only fact is — and I can say this honestly — that I love learning and a solitary life.
Christine de Pizan
It’s quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education.
Umberto Eco
Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before.
Loris Malaguzzi
Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.
Loris Malaguzzi
As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.
Giacomo Casanova
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.
Umberto Eco
Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.
Umberto Eco
Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.
Maria Montessori
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
Ezra Pound
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Leonardo da Vinci
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound
Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.
Mario Andretti
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Leonardo da Vinci
Never was anything great achieved without danger.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.
Luca Turin (Author) Tania Sanchez (Author)
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
This was the end of the Renaissance. Culture, once beloved and fostered by the papacy, opened the way to dangerous freedom. Then - as now - knowledge, culture, intellectual curiosity became suspect, even dangerous to oppressive regimes: knowledge leading to engaging the mind into reasoning, culture into wanting to know more, intellectual curiosity sharpening the appetite for information, fact. Ignorance was considered safe and political oppression went hand in hand with the congregation of the Inquisition.
Gaia Servadio
I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing.
Umberto Eco
What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world?
Carlo Rovelli
Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.
Carlo Rovelli
Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain...
Dante Alighieri
Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.
Galileo Galilei
A man has only so much knowledge as he puts to work.
Francis of Assisi
…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
Umberto Eco
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.
Christine de Pizan
[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.
Moderata Fonte
The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.
Leonardo da Vinci
Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning.
Christine de Pizan
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.
Giacomo Leopardi
The knowledge of all things is possible
Leonardo da Vinci
But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares.""So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans.""What a disappointment," I said. "I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood?
Umberto Eco
This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.
Julius Evola
But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.
Julius Evola
Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeugung tun.
Umberto Eco
El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.
Umberto Eco
In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.
Umberto Eco
National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
Umberto Eco
To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that?
Bonaventure
Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen.
Thomas Aquinas
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Umberto Eco
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
Umberto Eco
What do you care if people talk? Those who talk cannot harm you. Why should you be worried? You should only think about those things that please you. You have only one life in this world: soon you'll reach your eternal rest.
Christine de Pizan
Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.
Federico Chini
The greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hits.
Michaelangelo