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Quotes by Italian Authors
"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."
"Intellectual passion drives out sensuality."
"A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light."
"It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news."
"With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig."
"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."
"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 common sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses."
"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."
"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."
"What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?"
"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."
"If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects,' I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things."
"Realize that everything connects to everything else."
"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death."
"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 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."
"I really lack the words to compliment myself today."
"The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth."
"Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage."
"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."
"I've been in love for five hundred million years."
"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 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."
"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."
"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."
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