Giacomo Leopardi Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi
No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, nor knows it so thoroughly, nor is so much disgusted with it, but that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it.

Giacomo Leopardi
Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

Giacomo Leopardi
The old man, especially if he is in society in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.

Giacomo Leopardi
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.

Giacomo Leopardi
The greater part of the people we assign to educate our sons we know for certain are not educated. Yet we do not doubt that they can give what they have not received, a thing which cannot be otherwise acquired.

Giacomo Leopardi
The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.

Giacomo Leopardi
The artisan or scientist or the follower of whatever discipline who has the habit of comparing himself not with other followers but with the discipline itself will have a lower opinion of himself, the more excellent he is.

Giacomo Leopardi
Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.

Giacomo Leopardi
If the best company is that which we leave feeling most satisfied with ourselves, it follows that it is the company we leave most bored.

Giacomo Leopardi
Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.

Giacomo Leopardi
There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

Giacomo Leopardi
Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.

Giacomo Leopardi
What were we?
What was that bitter instant We called life?

Giacomo Leopardi
To that creature, being born,
Its birthday is a day to mourn.

Giacomo Leopardi
Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again —

Giacomo Leopardi
Glimmering stars of the Great Bear,
I never thought I'd be back to see you Shining down on my father's garden,
Nor talk to you ever again from the windows Of this house where I spent my childhood And saw the last of my happiness vanish.

Giacomo Leopardi
Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present.

Giacomo Leopardi
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
Every day we lose something; one of the illusions, which are our only riches, perishes or diminishes. Experience or truth divests us every day of part of our possessions. We do not live, except in losing.

Giacomo Leopardi