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"For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end."
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"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."
"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."
"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."
"Why is it that the cross has become the symbol of Christianity? It is because at the cross Jesus purchased our redemptionand provided a righteousness which we could not ourselves earn."
"Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil."
"Some only follow the holy man while others only follow the warlord. But the truth is, both sides are within all of us, and if people could only see that, they wouldn't have to wear masks, or pretend to be holy like a holy man, or pretend that nothing can hurt them like a warlord. They could just be themselves, unjudged."
"Christianity is not an accretion, it is not something added. It is a new total outlook which is satisfied with nothing less than penetration to the furthest corners of the mind and the understanding."
"We shouldn't think about ourselves and how weak we are. Instead, we should think about God and how strong He is."
"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don't know and have compassion for them at the same time?"
"We are never to do anything of which we are not perfectly clear and certain. If you have a doubt about that particular thing that is bothering you, as to whether it is worldly or not, the best policy is “don't do it."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV! I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
"I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology."
"And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine."
"Marco's answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan's head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there."
"You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book."
"Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did."
"They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now."
"What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial."
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