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Quotes by Italian Authors
"I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile."
"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."
"There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless."
"If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see."
"I am not solicitous to examine particularly everything here, which indeed could not be done in fifty years, because my desire is to make all possible discoveries, and return to your Highnesses, if it please our Lord, in April."
"Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood."
"Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual."
"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."
"The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off."
"After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?"
"I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing."
"Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy."
"The principal act of courage is to endure and withstand dangers doggedly rather than to attack them."
"Love must precede hatred, and nothing is hated save through being contrary to a suitable thing which is loved. And hence it is that every hatred is caused by love."
"For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps."
"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved."
"Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground."
"Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason."
"So I like to make music, and I like to share music. This is also a gift."
"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."
"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark."
"Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."
"Law; an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community."
"Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real."
"It is not fitting, when one is in God's service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look."
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