Italian Poet Quotes

Dante Alighieri

Petrarch

Nero

Francis of Assisi

Eugenio Montale

Ludovico Ariosto

Torquato Tasso

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

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

Jacopo Sannazaro

Your tiny hand is frozen, let me warm it in mine.

Giuseppe Giacosa

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

It was divine nature which gave us the country, and man's skill that built the cities.

Marcus Terentius Varro

Check the ailment before it's got to you...

All Savages are not normal and are dangerous to touch for any Englishman. Thinking about them are wrong and evil for thinking about Savages are wrong. Darwin was right and honest, and also true about what to do with such Savages. Kill them all and let God sort them out for Heaven will show itself in many ways.

Well says the proverb, that it is better to live with wild beasts in caves, than in the same house with a cross-grained and quarrelsome woman.

Agnolo Firenzuola

It was only my second night in Africa, yet something had begun to grow inside me which I could not stop, as if my childhood dreams had finally found the place where they could materialize. I had arrived where I was always meant to be. I did not know how it could be practically achieved, but I was certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was here that I wanted to live.

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 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

All books avoid, for they
Are the disgrace of our humanity,
And the assassins of the human race.
Mark well my words: the true
Philosophy consists in growing fat.

Giovanni Battista Lorenzi

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.

Let him look to it, who is pleased with the game of Tarocco, that the only signification of this word Tarocco, is stupid, foolish, simple, fit only to be used by Bakers, Coblers, and the vulgar, to play at most for the fourth part of a Carlino, at Tarocchi, or at Trionfi, or any Sminckiate whatever: which in every way signifies only foolery and idleness, feasting the eye with the Sun, and the Moon, and the twelve (signs) as children do.

Francesco Berni

Don't forget that even our most obscene vices nearly always bear the seal of sullen greatness.

Gesualdo Bufalino

To joyously savor one single instant of initial life I seek an innocent country

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Last Words:

What a great artist dies with me!

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.

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?

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

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

The ape, vilest of beast, how like us!

In Latin: Simia, quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis!

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

One doesn't remember the days, but rather the fleeting seconds.

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