Pietro Aretino Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

I love you and, because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.

Pietro Aretino
I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or better than friendship.

Pietro Aretino
A high heart ought to bear calamities and not flee them, since in bearing them appears the grandeur of the mind and in fleeing them the cowardice of the heart.

Pietro Aretino
Yes, let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.

Pietro Aretino
The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

Pietro Aretino
They merit more praise who know how to suffer misery than those who temper themselves in contentment.

Pietro Aretino
Learning is the property of those who fear to do disagreeable things.

Pietro Aretino
There is no food more satiating than milk and honey; and just as such foods produce disgust for the palate, so perfumed and gallant words make our ears belch.

Pietro Aretino
Desire is poison at lunch and wormwood at dinner; your bed is a stone, friendship is hateful and your fancy is always fixed on one thing.

Pietro Aretino
Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

Pietro Aretino
The art of war is like the art of the courtesan; indeed they might be called sisters, since both are slaves of desperation.

Pietro Aretino
A man who permits his honor to be taken, permits his life to be taken.

Pietro Aretino
Angry men are blind and foolish, for reason at such time takes flight and, in her absence; wrath plunders all the riches of the intellect, while the judgment remains the prisoner of its own pride.

Pietro Aretino
Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has it may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art.

Pietro Aretino
What evil is there in seeing a man possess a woman? Why, the beasts would be more free than we! It seems to me that that which is given us by nature for our own preservation ought to be worn round the neck as a pendant and in the hat for a medal.

Pietro Aretino
Anger represents a certain power, when a great mind, prevented from executing its own generous desires, is moved by it.

Pietro Aretino
Flee laziness which while it produces an immediate delight, ends in the sorrow of repentance. And know that nature without exercise is a seed shut up in the pod, and art without practice is nothing.

Pietro Aretino