Luigi Pirandello Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

Luigi Pirandello
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be - like the reality of yesterday - an illusion tomorrow.

Luigi Pirandello
Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Luigi Pirandello
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.

Luigi Pirandello
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something which you have to be all the time. Which isn't easy.

Luigi Pirandello
Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

Luigi Pirandello
In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.

Luigi Pirandello
Woman - for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind."

Luigi Pirandello
Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!

Luigi Pirandello
Each of us—on the outside, in front of others—dresses in dignity, but inside himself he is well aware of these unconfessable things that pass through the secrecy of his heart.

Luigi Pirandello
Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Luigi Pirandello
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Luigi Pirandello
It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!

Luigi Pirandello
We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Luigi Pirandello
The facts are to blame, my friend. We are all imprisoned by facts: I was born, I exist.

Luigi Pirandello
None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.

Luigi Pirandello
Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

Luigi Pirandello
Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.

Luigi Pirandello
We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can't make it think.

Luigi Pirandello
We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.

Luigi Pirandello
There is someone who is living my life. And I know nothing about him.

Luigi Pirandello
The secret of living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.

Luigi Pirandello
PRODUCER: Let's get to the point, let's get to the point. This is all chat.
FATHER: Right then! But a fact is like a sack — it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.

Luigi Pirandello
Can't you see that your conscience means, in fact, those others inside you?

Luigi Pirandello
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

Luigi Pirandello
Phantoms in general are nothing more than trifling disorders of the spirit; images we cannot contain within the bounds of sleep.

Luigi Pirandello
When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

Luigi Pirandello
Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you'll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!

Luigi Pirandello
Personally, I don't give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.

Luigi Pirandello
You know what it means to be with a madman? To be with someone who shakes the foundations, the logic of the whole structure of everything you've built in and around yourselves.

Luigi Pirandello