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Quotes by Italian Authors
"You will also allow me to thank the Academy for inviting me to lecture in Stockholm, for its hospitality, and for the opportunity afforded me for admiring the charm of your people and the beauty of your country."
"Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others."
"He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives."
"A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion."
"Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again."
"I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my high appreciation of the honour extended to me many years ago by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science by enrolling me amongst its members."
"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."
"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."
"He who thinks little errs much."
"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."
"But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit."
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."
"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."
"Without forgiveness life is governed by... an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation."
"In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature."
"You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself."
"To describe and explain my ideas is to lose them."
"Always I pay. Always I pay. How do you know Gelli? What do you want? How much do you want?"
"Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering."
"If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight."
"Eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness."
"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
"A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes - as it is already to a large extent - no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a 'free-range warren but a 'battery one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed."
"I do what I like now. I just don't have time for it all."
"Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death."
"These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off."
"A woman at 20 is like ice, at 30 she is warm and at 40 she is hot."
"I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art."
"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."
"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."
"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
"The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is."
"Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy."
"Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story."
"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."
"The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body."
"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."
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