Italian Author Quotes

Dante Alighieri

Giovanni Boccaccio

Petrarch

Nero

Giacomo Casanova

Francis of Assisi

Luigi Pirandello

He who talks much cannot always talk well.

Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.

Jacopo Sannazaro

We are but a day in this world, and in that day the fashion is changed a thousand times: all seek liberty, yet all deprive themselves of it.

Dante Alighieri

But what is history, Don Ferrante would often say, without politics? A guide who walks on and on with no one following to learn the road, so that his every step is wasted; just as politics without history is like a man who walks along without a guide.

Alessandro Manzoni

May I look on thee when my last hour comes; may I hold thy hand, as I sink, in my dying clasp.

Yet will the loved one's gentle smile suffice
To ope the door of Paradise,
And turn to joy our dark and cruel lot.

Francesco Maria Molza

Someone might object, "But you do not express yourself like Cicero". What of it? I am not Cicero. But I think I express my own self.

Free is the vote, the right inviolate,
But victory falls to him whose aim is straight.

Francesco Dall'Ongaro

When the ground is soft
It may be worked with any kind of tool.

Giovanni Maria Cecchi

Making art means not only using languages, but also creating new ones. To do this, new tools are indispensable. Even returning to more traditional languages such as linear poetry or narration, after being enriched by the experience of hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia, allows us to rethink the older forms of expression and transfer the lessons of the new media into even the more traditional modalities of language, such as narrative, for example.

Caterina Davinio

What will the stream become in its lengthened course, if it be so turbid at its source?

But that he wrought so high the specious tale,
As manifested plainly 'twas a lie.

Ludovico Ariosto

Many strange birds are on the air abroad, Nor are all of one flights of one force, But each after his kind dissimilar.

Guido Guinizzelli

Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?

Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.

All papas and mammas have exactly that sort of sight which distinguishes objects at a distance clearly, while they need spectacles to see those under their very noses.

Giovanni Ruffini

The greater the attention to the sentence, the more laboriously the story flows.

There are fools who seek to understand the secrets of nature.

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Eugenio Montale

It has always been more difficult for a man to keep than to get; for, in the one case, fortune aids, which often assists injustice; but, in the other case, sense is required. Therefore, we often see a person deficient in cleverness rise to wealth; and then, from want of sense, roll head over heels to the bottom.

Giambattista Basile

Practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.

Baldassare Castiglione

Men are just like unlit lamps: in themselves they are no good for anything, but, when lit, they can be handy to have around the house.

Lose thou no time that seek'st to garner fame,
Or wouldst deserve the favor of thy dame.

Giovanni Fiorentino

Wise were the kings who never chose a friend till with full cups they had unmasked his soul, and seen the bottom of his deepest thoughts.

Age overtakes us all; Our temples first; then on o'er cheek and chin, Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time. Up and do somewhat, ere thy limbs are sere.