Quotes from Petrarch

Virtue is health, vice is sickness.

Perhaps I am sated with travel, with rambling through many lands; perhaps my youthful ardor is relaxing and cooling, turning naturally to a love of peace, suitable for my occupations. At any rate I am losing my love of roving.

Virtue 'gainst fury shall advance the fight, and it to the combat soon shall put to flight, for the Old Roman Valor is not dead! Nor in the Italian's breasts, extinguish-ed.

Your Homer is here with me; mute or rather in fact deaf am I, in front of him. But I am happy to gaze upon him and often hug him and, sighing, say, 'Great man, how I would love to hear you!

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.

Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

Virtue is health, vice is sickness.

Who naught suspects is easily deceived.

Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.

How fortune brings to earth the over-sure!

A good death does honour to a whole life.

And I live on, but in grief and self-contempt, Left here without the light I loved so much, In a great tempest and with shrouds unkempt.

And tears are heard within the harp I touch.

I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.

While life is in your body, you have the rein of all thoughts in your hands.

Life in itself is short enough, but the physicians with their art, know to their amusement, how to make it still shorter.

Alack our life, so beautiful to see, With how much ease life losest, in a day, What many years with pain and toil amassed!

Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure.

It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.

What name to call thee by, O virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenances.

An equal doom clipp'd Time's blest wings of peace.

Man has no greater enemy than himself.