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Quotes by Italian Authors
"To describe and explain my ideas is to lose them."
"Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness and Light, Solidity and Color, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest."
"Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man."
"The smallest feline is a masterpiece."
"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."
"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."
"A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light."
"To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido."
"If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television."
"I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed."
"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind."
"Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel."
"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."
"Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness."
"In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing."
"He who does not value life does not deserve it."
"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."
"I felt like poisoning a monk."
"I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly."
"Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it."
"The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions."
"The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body."
"Our life is full of empty space."
"Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away."
"Intellectual passion drives out sensuality."
"We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves."
"To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize on them is infinitely worse."
"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."
"It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own."
"Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich."
"Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges."
"A good painter is to paint two main things namely men and the working of man's mind."
"It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news."
"The natural desire of good men is knowledge."
"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
"We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land."
"All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part."
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