Giacomo Leopardi Quotes

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

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

Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.

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

Rest forever, tired heart. The final illusion has perished. The one we believed eternal is gone. Just like that. Out the door desire follows hope. Rest forever. Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention nor is the earth worth a sigh. Bitterness and boredom is life, nothing else ever, and the world is mud. Quiet now. Despair for the last time. Fate gives us dying as a gift. Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power which rules for the common evil and the infinite vanity of it all.

Ignorance is the greatest source of happiness.

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

That is why all great men are modest: they consistently measure themselves not in comparison to other people but to the idea of perfection ever present in their minds, an ideal infinitely clearer and greater than any common people have, and they also realize how far they are from fulfilling their ideal.

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

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

Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.

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

He who doubts, knows - knows as much as can be known.

The end of pain we take as happiness.

There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical.

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

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

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.

Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again --

No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it.

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.

What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go contemplating wastelands; then you set.

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