Quotes from Francesco Petrarca

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

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.

The world's delight is a brief dream.

I cannot have a sufficiency of books. Indeed, I have more than I should... Books give utter delight: they talk with us... and are bound to us by lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates a longing for another.

walk forwards in the radiance of the past

Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. (Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness.)

Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality.

Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.

Nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio (Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness)

And what is the use of knowing many things if, when you have learned the dimensions of heaven and earth, the measure of the seas, the courses of stars, the virtues of plants and stones, the secrets of nature, you still don't know yourself?

Everything else, every thought, goes fore and forever fades away into the recesses of time, and therein what remains is my soul's love for you.

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make?

loving friendship is able to endure everything; it refuses no burden.

Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate...

Among the many subjects which interested me, I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I delighted in history.

How much I envy you, you greedy earth, who get to clasp the one who's taken from me, and keep me from the air of her sweet face in which I once found peace from all my war! How

If I believed I could free myself, by dying, from amorous thoughts that bind me to the earth, I would already have laid these troubled limbs and their burden in the earth myself:

Pace non trovo e non ho da far guerra.

Learning is my sole delight.

I stop, then, in my tracks, to recollect the awesome presence that I've left behind, the road ahead so long, my life so short, and bow my head and burst out into tears. While

There cannot be a heart so hard that weeping, praying and loving sometime will not move, nor yet a will so cold it cannot burn.

böyle kaçar?m ölümün vuruÅŸlar?ndan; ama h?zl? deÄŸil kaç???m, arzumun benimle gelemeyeceÄŸi kadar, hep geldiÄŸi gibi sessiz yürürüm, yoksa ölü sözler aÄŸlat?r insanlar?, oysa ben yaln?z aks?n isterim gözyaÅŸlar?m.

Among various joys, the fruit of labor is the sweetest.

Now that the time that calls me to depart draws near, I think, or will not be too long, like one whom losses make acute and wise, I keep on wondering where I left the way that leads to a safe haven on the right: and on the one hand I am stung by shame and sorrow making me turn back; and on the other cannot break the habit of a pleasure grown so strong that now it dares to play for time with death.