Quotes from Petrarch

A good death does honor to a whole life.

Who overrefines his argument brings himself to grief.

Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.

Do you suppose there is any living man so unreasonable that if he found himself stricken with a dangerous ailment he would not anxiously desire to regain the blessing of health?

To be able to say how much you love is to love but little.

Go mortals, sweat, pant, toil, range the lands and seas to pile up riches you cannot keep; glory that will not last. The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.

To have displeased evil and ignorant men is the sure sign of genius and virtue...

No one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all , aggressively perverse.

I feed my heart with sighs, that's all it asks, I live on tears, I think I'm born to weep; I don't complain of that, since in my state weeping is sweeter than you might believe.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

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.

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

Love discovered me all weaponless, and opened the way to the heart through the eyes, which are made the passageways and doors of tears: so that it seems to me it does him little honour to wound me with his arrow, in that state, he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed

I am possessed by one insatiable passion , which I cannot restrain nor would I if I could ... I cannot get enough books .

Yet have I oft been beaten in the field, And sometimes hurt," said I, "but scorn'd to yield." He smiled and said: "Alas! thou dost not see, My son, how great a flame's prepared for thee.

never would I trade for some new shape that laurel I was first, in whose sweet shade all other pleasures vanish in my heart.

Vos vestros servate, meos mihi linquite mores."

Al' iako ja sam stvor sazdan od zemlje, uporna mi ?ežnja potje?e sa zvijezda." VII

Gold,silver,gems, fine raiment , a marble palace, well-cultivated fields, paintings, a splendidly caparisoned horse such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and lively companions to us .

My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.

For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?

And, to tell finally my greatest service, I've kept him from a thousand vicious acts, for low and vile things could never serve to give him satisfaction (a young many shy and modest in his acts and thoughts) once he'd become her slave and vassal; she made so deep a mark upon his heart, that he must emulate her... "Again, and this is what I'll finish with, I gave him wings to fly beyond the skies by means of mortal things, which make a ladder to our Maker, rightly used...

Oh blessèd be the day, the month, the year, the season and the time, the hour, the instant, the gracious countryside, the place where I was struck by those two lovely eyes that bound me.

Vede insieme l'uno e l'altro polo, Le stelle vaghe e lor viaggio torto; E vedi, 'I veder nostro quanto e corto. (You see both poles at once, the travelling stars in their winding courses, and you see just how limited our seeing really is.)