Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 6

Remorse shows the difference between a cruel person and one that is not.
Federico Chini
When one opens a book, one should also open one's mind.
Adriano Bulla
I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf.
Erri De Luca
This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.
Erri De Luca
Haste denies all acts their dignity.
Dante Alighieri
I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.
Giovanni Arduino
Time: no start no end, the most powerful force in nature, killing more people than 100 atomic bombs, generating thoughts & ideas. Devil&Good
Rossana Condoleo
He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.
Dante Alighieri
Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.
Federico Fellini
Why did it have to be such a shameful secret? Hadn’t I been potty-trained and taught to chew with my mouth closed? So what was the freaking big deal about having sex? Wasn’t it essential to the survival of our darn, hypocritical species?
Gaia B. Amman
There is nothing harder than telling your own mother you’re everything she hoped you were not.
Gaia B. Amman
Stop categorizing and labeling! This is your way to avoid the unknown but brings the risk to avoid the new!
Rossana Condoleo
There is no better manager than a natural born one.
Rossana Condoleo
There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it.
Ugo Betti
[...T]he ways of God have been manifested beyond example: the sea is divided, the cloud has led the way, the rock has poured forth water, it has rained manna, everything has contributed to your greatness; you ought to do the rest. God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolò Machiavelli
God's greatest gift to manIn all the bounty He was moved to makeThroughout creation-the one gift the mostClose to his goodness and the one He callsMost precious-is free will.
Dante Alighieri
What remains to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us, God will not do everything himself.
Niccolò Machiavelli
But chance has a taste for conspiracy.
Umberto Eco
Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.
Gian-Carlo Rota
And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. “ The Prince, XVIII, 5
Niccolò Machiavelli
Controlling the position of one's body and keeping a straight back are not contemplation, but can in fact become an obstacle to contemplation. ...when leaving the body 'uncontrolled' is spoken of, what is meant is simply allowing the body to remain in an authentic, uncorrected condition, in which it is not necessary to modify or improve anything. This is because, since all our attempts at correcting the body come from the reasoning mind, they are all false and artificial.
Namkhai Norbu
The body is not a product. It is an experience.
Daniele Bolelli
Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.
Francis of Assisi
At the ponds that evening I said to Antonio: "It's always been like that, since we were little: everyone thinks she's bad and I'm good."He kissed me, murmuring ironically, "Why, isn't that true?"That response touched me and kept me from telling him that we had to part. It was a decision that seemed to me urgent, the affection wasn't love, I loved Nino, I knew I would love him forever. I had a gentle speech prepared for Antonio, I wanted to say to him: It's been wonderful, you helped me a lot at a time when I was sad, but now school is starting and this year is going to be difficult, I have new subjects, I'll have to study a lot; I'm sorry but we have to stop. I felt it was necessary and every afternoon I went to our meeting at the ponds with my little speech ready. But he was so affectionate, so passionate, that my courage failed and I put it off.
Elena Ferrante
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
Cesare Pavese
The freedom we want, for ourselves and for others, is not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom which in practice is inevitably translated into the oppression of the weak; but it is real freedom, possible freedom, which is the conscious community of interests, voluntary solidarity.
Errico Malatesta
You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.
Erri De Luca
We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,Neither mortal or immortal, So that with freedom of choice and with honor, As thought the maker and molder of thyself, Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
In this city [Palermo] . . . it's the souls of the dead who bring presents to the children. . . . We go to the cemetery to ask the dead for toys.
Gianni Riotta
She was always on her feet. Cooking. Washing. Ironing.
Niccolò Ammaniti
Be strong and kill yourself with the sword of hate and love, then you will not hear the insults and abuse which the enemies of the Church throw at you. Your eyes will not see anything which seems impossible, or the sufferings which may follow, but only the light of faith, and in that light everything is possible; and remember God never lays greater burdens on us than we can bear.
Catherine of Siena
There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel’s laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type.
Julius Evola
Heavy resistance strength training (loads > 85% 1RM) appears to evoke significant gains in maximal eccentric muscle strength.
Marco Cardinale
... Physicians tell us of hectic fever, that in its beginning it is easy to cure, but hard to recognize; whereas, after a time, not having been detected and treated at the first, it becomes easy to recognize but impossible to cure. And so it is with State affairs.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Tiago had heard of what some called the 'human database' or 'omnilogos', but nothing could have prepared him for this.
Michele Amitrani
As once I loved you in my mortal flesh, without it now I love you still.
Dante Alighieri
I didn't go there lightly. I knew even then that this was the beginning of something very hard to reverse. But I couldn't do otherwise now: I was too possessed
Francesca Marciano
Yet have I oft been beaten in the field, And sometimes hurt," said I, "but scorn'd to yield." He smiled and said: "Alas! thou dost not see, My son, how great a flame's prepared for thee.
Francesco Petrarca
Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Discipline is the great equalizer. If a young woman is beautiful but has no discipline, she will lose her looks as she grows older. If a plain woman is disciplined she will undoubtedly become more beautiful with time.
Sophia Loren
The language of categories is affectionately known as "abstract nonsense," so named by Norman Steenrod. This term is essentially accurate and not necessarily derogatory: categories refer to "nonsense" in the sense that they are all about the "structure," and not about the "meaning," of what they represent.
Paolo Aluffi
Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.
Gian-Carlo Rota
And, believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
Italo Calvino
With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.
Italo Calvino
He was so drunk that he would have stubbornly denied that he was.
Filippo Bologna
Just like a human foetus, while in the uterus, retrieves and assimilates the components that allow its physical body to become whole and fit to emerge into the outer reality, the third dimension serves the purpose of shamanic pregnancy, which is about retrieving and integrating the fragmented pieces of the soul, finally giving birth to the multidimensional self.
Franco Santoro
Of this poetryI’m left with the emptinessof an endless secret
Giuseppe Ungaretti
The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty]
Alberto Moravia
Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.
Pope Leo XIII
The excluded when on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true leper are only the illustration ordained by god to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying “lepers” we would understand “outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities” but we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the words of Christ, would condemn the behaviour of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful have always realised this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded a reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers.
Umberto Eco
It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need
Thomas Aquinas
I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.
Elena Ferrante
A man of forty-five can consider himself still young till the moment comes when he realises that he has children old enough to fall in love.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Consider that fact that, being nothing in ourselves, we cannot, without divine assistance, accomplish the smallest good or advance the smallest step toward Heaven.
Lorenzo Scupoli
Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I'm a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.
Andrea Camilleri
I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both priests and magistrates, because both were his best clients.
Pitigrilli
Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a person courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole person, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more refined instrument for the search and communication of truth….
Pope Pius XII
I don't like playing playstation. It seems like a waste of time to me. Reading, instead, leaves something inside you.
Mattia Caldara