Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 5

If the chief party whether it be the people or the army or the nobility which you think most useful and of most consequence to you for the conservation of your dignity be corrupt you must follow their humor and indulge them and in that case honesty and virtue are pernicious.
Machiavelli
Concentration is everything. On the day I'm performing I don't hear anything anyone says to me.
Luciano Pavarotti
Comparisons are odious.
Archbishop Boiardo
The bee and the serpent often sip from the selfsame flower.
Pietro Metastasio
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri
The secret of living is to find a pivot the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.
Luigi Pirandello
Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why some people with mediocre talent but with great inner drive go much further than people with vastly superior talent.
Sophia Loren
Don't ask me to give in to this body of mine. I can't afford it. Between me and my body there must be a struggle until death.
Saint Margaret of Cortona
Nations like individuals live and die but civilization cannot die.
Guiseppe Mazzini
If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.
Ezra Pound
With luck on your side you can do without brains.
Giordano Bruno
If you want things to stay as they are things will have to change.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Benefits should be granted little by little so that they may be better enjoyed.
Niccolò Machiavelli
There is one basic cause of all effects.
Giordano Bruno
A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
Gian Vincenzo Cravina
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
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
Michelangelo
Beauty - the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
Leon Battista Alberti
Art is a kind of illness.
Giacomo Puccini
Art as far as it is able follows nature as a pupil imitates his master thus your art must be as it were God's grandchild.
Dante Alighieri
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
Michelangelo
When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said "It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David."
Michelangelo
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
Good architecture lets nature in.
Mario Pei
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes but few have the gift of penetration.
Machiavelli
Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.
Pietro Aretino
Good counsel has no price.
Guiseppe Mazzini
They merit more praise who know how to suffer misery than those who temper themselves in contentment.
Pietro Aretino
Remember that the Devil doesn't sleep but seeks our ruin in a thousand different ways
Angela Merici
An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men.
Ignazio Silone
We are the wire God is the current. Our only power is to let the current pass through us.
Carlo Carretto
Oh Lord thou givest us everything at the price of an effort.
Leonardo da Vinci
The fair request ought to be followed by the deed in silence.
Dante Alighieri
When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.
Luigi Pirandello
Since God has been pleased to give us the Papacy let us enjoy it.
Pope Leo X
Whoever coined the phrase '"I can work well under pressure" should be put on trial for crimes against Humanity.
Adriano Bulla
Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to "know" them, and know how to use them.
Antonio Gramsci
I see the pain of miserly love in young people,' I say. 'You don't have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I'm careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It's not like dancing. It's like a stone walkway with a little grass between the cracks. It's strong but I will try to tread carefully and not ruin it. In Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you.
Erri De Luca
A conversation between Adso and William -You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.""And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don't know know why you know that you know what you do?"I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. "Perhaps that's it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.
Umberto Eco
Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
Francis of Assisi
... By disarming, you at once give offense, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...
Niccolò Machiavelli
Angels need an assumed body, not for themselves, but on our account.
Thomas Aquinas
The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.
Alberto Cairo
Yes, I was scared, vulnerable, and fragile and lived in books more than real life. Yet there was nothing Mom could do to make things easier for me, just worse by grounding me for life at the slightest hint of truth. Why? Because in spite of what she said she did not trust me or, to put it in her words, I did not know what was good for me.Being a teenager sucks! I might as well have been in prison.
Gaia B. Amman
We have to defend views we don't share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don't understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can't have ideas of our own, we have to have those of the editor; and even the editor doesn't have the right to think with his own head, because when he's sent for by the board of directors he has to stifle his own views, if he has any, and support those of the shareholders.
Pitigrilli
In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.
Alberto Cairo
It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.
Umberto Eco
Denis's love for Mattia had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent.
Paolo Giordano
When I'm in love, I can't stand anyone.
Stefano Benni
And in that moment I experience a revelation.I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: "God does not exist.
Umberto Eco
Fix your course to a star and you can navigate through any storm
Leonardo da Vinci
He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.
Giulio Tononi
There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.
Elena Ferrante
Before I came here, I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture, I am still confused -- but on a higher level.
Enrico Fermi
Film is one if three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra
So, Colonna, please demonstrate to our friends how it's possible to respect, or appear to respect, one fundamental principle of democratic journalism, which is separating fact from opinion. ...''Simple,' I said. 'Take the major British or American newspapers. If they report, say, a fire or a car accident, then obviously they can't indulge in saying what they think. And so they introduce into the piece, in quotation marks, the statements of a witness, a man in the street, someone who represents public opinion. Those statements, once put in quotes, become facts - in other words, it's a fact that that person expressed that opinion. But it might be assumed that the journalist has only quoted someone who thinks like him. So there will be two conflicting statements to show, as a fact, that there are varying opinions on a particular issue, and the newspaper is taking account of this irrefutable fact. The trick lies in quoting first a trivial opinion and then another opinion that is more respectable, and more closely reflects the journalist's view. In this way, readers are under the impression that they are being informed about two facts, but they're persuaded to accept just one view as being more convincing.
Umberto Eco
The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.
Lara Santoro