Quotes from Giacomo Leopardi

Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.

Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

Ignorance is the greatest source of happiness.

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.

It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.

No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance.

The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.

The commonplace expression that life is nothing but a play is verified above all in this: the world speaks absolutely consistently in one way and acts absolutely consistently in another.

The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die.

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much the master of the world as he who is ready to die.

You can be happy indeed if you have breathing space from pain.

I get up and I bless the light thin clouds and the first twittering of birds, and the breathing air and smiling face of the hills.

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.

It's interesting to observe that almost all truly worthy men have simple manners, and that simple manners are almost always taken as a sign of little worth

In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

Irresolute men are sometimes very persistent in their undertakings, because if they give up their designs they would have to make a second resolution.

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.