Giacomo Leopardi Quotes

Stato che sia, dentro covile o cuna,
È funesto a chi nasce il dì natale.

No one can truthfully boast or say in anger: I cannot be unhappier than I am.

Non ha natura al seme Dell'uom più stima o cura Che alla formica: e se più rara in quello Che nell'altra è la strage, Non avvien ciò d'altronde uor che l'uom sue prosapie ha men feconde.

You laugh openly and loudly about something, even entirely innocently, with one or two people in a café, in a conversation, in a street: everybody who hears or sees you laughing like this will turn and look at you with respect; if they were talking, they will stop, they will seem humbled; they will never dare to laugh at you; if they had previously looked at you boldly or condescendingly, they will lose their boldness and condescension toward you. In the end, simply laughing out loud gives you a definite superiority over all those near and around you, without exception. The power of laughter is terrible and awful: anyone who has the courage to laugh is master over others, in the same way as anyone who has the courage to die.

ICELANDER: So say all the philosophers. But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which hitherto no philosopher has satisfied me? For whose pleasure and service is this wretched life of the world maintained, by the suffering and death of all the beings which compose it?

NATURE: So flees the squirrel from the rattlesnake, and runs in its haste deliberately into the mouth of its tormentor. I am that from which thou fleest.

In every land the universal vices and ills of mankind and of human society are noted as peculiar to that place. I have never been anywhere where I have not heard, "Here the women are vain and inconstant; they read little and they're poorly educated. Here the public are curious about other people's affairs, and they're very talkative and slanderous. Here money, favour and baseness can achieve anything. Here envy rules, and friendships are hardly sincere," and so on and so on, as if things went on differently elsewhere. Men are wretched by necessity, and determined to believe themselves wretched by accident.

Those innumerable and immense questions about time and space, argued over from the beginnings of metaphysics onward, by metaphysicians of every century, are none other than wars of words, caused by misunderstandings, and imprecision of thought, and limited ability to understand our mind, which is the only place where time and space, like many other abstract things, exist independently and for themselves, and are something.