Petrarch Quotes

It did not seem to me to be a time to guard myself
against Love's blows: so I went on
confident, unsuspecting; from that, my troubles
started, amongst the public sorrows

I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.

Since speaking of her eyes calls up the passion in me, and nothing else I do affects me quite so deeply, I must visit often where my sorrow wells up and overflows its boundaries, and thus my eyes are punished with my heart, because they led me on the road to love.

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Un bel morir tutta la vita honora.

Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore
quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i' sono.

Shame is the fruit of all my clever ravings; so are repentance and my knowing clearly that every worldly pleasure is a dream.

Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra;
e temo, et spero; et ardo, et son un ghiaccio.

There is nothing in the world that cannot be done by verses.

Hidden beauty is sweetest.

. . . The senses reign, and reason now is dead;
from one pleasing desire comes another.
Virtue, honor, beauty, gracious bearing,
sweet words have caught me in her lovely branches
in which my heart is tenderly entangled.
In thirteen twenty-seven, and precisely
at the first hour of the sixth of April
I entered the labyrinth, and I see no way out.

[From] two lovely eyes that have bound me.

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

And what is the cause hereof, but only our own lightness & daintiness: for we seem to be good for nothing else, but to be tossed hither & thither like a Tennise bal, being creatures of very short life, of infinite carefulness, & yet ignorant unto what shore to sail with our ship

Neither exhortations to virtue nor the argument of approaching death should divert us from literature; for in a good mind it excites the love of virtue, and dissipates, or at least diminishes, the fear of death.