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Quotes by Italian Authors
"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."
"Fear prophets, Adso, 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."
"There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."
"To become an artist you have to be curious."
"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see."
"Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale."
"It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once."
"The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances."
"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed."
"It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party."
"In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind."
"The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature."
"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."
"The common sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses."
"What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?"
"But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects."
"From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola."
"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis."
"To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another."
"No counsel is more sincere than that given on ships which are in danger."
"Realize that everything connects to everything else."
"He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal."
"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 beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."
"The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity."
"You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself."
"How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon."
"The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth."
"Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it."
"He who thinks little errs much."
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power."
"Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity."
"Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting."
"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death."
"Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements."
"If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden."
"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."
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