Quotes from Giacomo Leopardi

Io non ho mai sentito tanto di vivere quanto amando, benché tutto il resto del mondo fosse per me come morto. L'amore è la vita e il principio vivificante della natura, come l'odio il principe distruggente e mortale. Le cose son fatte per amarsi scambievolmente, e la vita nasce da questo.

Times of trouble demand not tears but counsel.]

My thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet to me in this sea.

In the old days, books had awful covers and marvelous content; nowadays, the opposite happens.

So the peak of human knowledge or philosophy is to recognize its own uselessness—if man were still the same as he was in the beginning—and to undo the damage that it has done, and return man to the condition in which he would always have been if it had never existed.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.

He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world. This is because it is practical experience of life, and certainly not philosophy, that makes people hate their fellows.

Fate gave birth at one and the same time to two siblings, Love and Death.

People are ashamed, not of the injustices they do, but of those they receive. And so, in order that the unjust person should be ashamed, there is no other way than to give as good as one gets.

So, ignorant of man and of the age that he calls ancient, and of the descendants following their ancestors, nature stays evergreen; indeed she travels such a long road she might as well be standing still. Meanwhile kingdoms fall, languages and peoples die; she doesn't see. Yet man takes it upon himself to praise eternity.

Che pensieri soavi, che speranze, che cori, o Silvia mia! Quale allor ci apparia la vita umana e il fato! Quando sovviemmi di cotanta speme, un affetto mi preme acerbo e sconsolato, e tornami a doler di mia sventura. O natura, o natura, perché non rendi poi quel che prometti allor? perché di tanto inganni i figli tuoi?

But he's a fool who doesn't see how swift the wings of youth are, and how near the cradle lies to the grave.

Man for Leopardi is first and foremost an animal, and his history is merely the last section of the much more ancient history of all living species, which in their turn are an integral part of the entire ecological system.

Being asked for what purpose he thought men were bom, he laughingly replied: " To realise how much better it were not to be born.

E tu, cui già dal cominciar degli anni sempre onorata invoco, bella Morte, pietosa tu sola al mondo dei terreni affanni[…] chiudi alla luce omai questi occhi tristi […] nel mio sangue innocente non ricolmar di lode, non benedir, com'usa per antica viltà l'umana gente

Man is born by labor, [40] and birth itself means risking death.

The certain, lonely knowledge [120] that everything is vain but grief.

Non solamente bisogna che il poeta imiti e dipinga a perfezione la natura, ma anche che la imiti e dipinga con naturalezza, anzi non imita la natura chi non la imita con naturalezza.

but clearly the hypothesis, put forth in another note, of a future split into "two kinds of poetry and literature, one for the knowledgeable, the other for ordinary people" (Z 4388) seems now, two centuries later, to be prophetic.

L'irresoluzione è peggio della disperazione.

La perfetta uguaglianza è la base necessaria della libertà. Vale a dire, è necessario che fra quelli fra' quali il potere è diviso, non vi sia squilibrio di potere; e nessuno ne abbia più né meno di un altro. Perché in questo e non in altro è riposta l'idea, l'essenza e il fondamento della libertà.

sicché gli animi freddi e stanchi per l'esperienza delle cose, erano confortati vedendo il calore e le speranze dell'età verde.

So my mind sinks in this immensity: And foundering is sweet in such a sea".

But you were born to gentle dreams,