Italian Philosopher Quotes

Umberto Eco

Maria Montessori

Giacomo Leopardi

Benedetto Croce

Marsilio Ficino

Giuseppe Mazzini

Tommaso Campanella

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

Do not listen to vain and empty talk, in which the majority of world-loving people spend their time, and do not take pleasure in it. For the law says: 'You shall not raise false reports' (Ex. 23:1). Solomon says: 'Remove far from me vanity and lies' (Prov. 30:8). The Lord said: 'But I say to you, every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment' (Mt. 12:36).

Lorenzo Scupoli

What is a scientist?...We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.

Maria Montessori

An example from the monkey: The higher it climbs, the more you see of its behind.

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system

Giorgio Agamben

Mortal men ask God for good things every day, but they never pray that they may make good use of them.

Marsilio Ficino

But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

He who writes in a rich language is like a man with many suits of clothes, some for home wear, others in which to appear in public, and others for state occasions.

Francesco Maria Zanotti

The woman who goes to bed with a man must put off her modesty with her petticoat, and put it on again with the same.

We begin to reason from sensible objects, and definition is the end and epilogue of science. It is not the beginning of our knowing, but only of our teaching.

Tommaso Campanella

History is so full of high-level intelligence officials who actually worked for the other side that one is forced to conclude that whether or not top intelligence jobs attract the disloyal, they surely offer incentives to disloyalty.

Angelo Codevilla

We are used to thinking in terms of what we can teach our children. Maybe we need to ask ourselves what we may learn from them.

Our beneficent Creator is desirous, that, as he originally favoured human nature with longevity, we should all enjoy the full advantage of his intentions, knowing, that when a man has passed seventy, he may be exempt from the sensual strivings, and govern himself entirely by the dictates of reason.

In the practice of any craft, we are less concerned with the quantity of the product than with its quality, and less concerned with the product than with the artisan.

Lanza del Vasto

The Americans' 'open-mindedness', which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their 'individualism'. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

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

Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind.

Benedetto Croce

But yet creation's neither crammed nor blocked
About by body: there's in things a void-
Which to have known will serve thee many a turn,
Nor will not leave thee wandering in doubt,
Forever searching in the sum of all,
And losing faith in these pronouncements mine.

The world grows older and grows worse from generation to generation.

Alessandro Piccolomini

Vico claims that the aim of philosophy is the problem of "finding," and he identifies the theory of "finding" with "topical philosophy. …

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

Giambattista Vico

For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.

Cesare Beccaria

The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads.

Giuseppe Mazzini