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Quotes by Italian Authors
"Three conditions are necessary for Penance: contrition, which is sorrow for sin, together with a purpose of amendment; confession of sins without any omission; and satisfaction by means of good works."
"Don't get married to an actress because they're also actresses in bed."
"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."
"Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper."
"My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself."
"I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts."
"This new art made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently."
"William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound."
"Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun."
"The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark."
"Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher."
"One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself."
"The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard."
"Humans: become atheists each and all! God will nevertheless welcome you with all his heart!"
"Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeugung tun.“
"Give me a fruitful error anytime, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections."
"The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect."
"I was little impressed with this rough and ready way of persuading people to renew their contracts and decided that I was now quite free of any obligations."
"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text."
"The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea."
"In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames."
"A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks."
"The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information."
"Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is."
"The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast."
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously."
"Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe-with charity-that there is still room for Hope."
"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."
"Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death."
"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."
"For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all."
"Acting is not that far from mental disease: An actor works on splitting his character into others. It is like a kind of schizophrenia."
"The room where I am lodging is stupendous. Thank God I am as fit as a fiddle."
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