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Quotes by Italian Authors
"In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world."
"The first movie I saw - and I don't know if it influenced me - was Ben Hur. We watched it outside in a corn field, and it ran backwards, so the first movie I ever saw was Ben Hur backwards."
"Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing."
"The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living."
"In any case, whenever technical progress opened a new window into the surrounding world, I felt the urge to look through this window, hoping to see something unexpected."
"Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help."
"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
"You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You're one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!"
"The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute."
"You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not."
"You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life."
"What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss."
"As far as our fans are concerned, I'm the only one who counts; along with my teammates, obviously."
"Fine gold is recognized when it is tested."
"Joseph Stalin is a titan of thought. His name is to be given to an entire century."
"They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach."
"Give me a fruitful error anytime, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections."
"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do."
"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books."
"Art owes its origin to Nature herself... this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it."
"It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves."
"Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous."
"Don't you ever get tired of reading?' she asked. 'You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?' she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening."
"It's typical of Italian culture that we only start to feel emotional about something when we have the possibility to see it in front of us. By February, Italy will have Olympic fever."
"Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known."
"The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever."
"Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge."
"Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence."
"Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power."
"You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others."
"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."
"Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is."
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