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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Quotes

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Change, Want, Ifs

Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Love, Flames, Years
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1960). “The Leopard”, Pantheon Books

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Change, Book, Want
The Leopard ch. 1 (1957) (translation by Archibald Colquhoun)

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Thinking, Sheep, Two
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (2010). “The Leopard: Revised and with new material”, p.143, Random House

Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Short Life, Passion, Self

To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Rage, Mock, Gentlemanly

A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
House, Rooms, Worth Living
"The Leopard" translated by Archibald Colquhoun, London: Fontana, (p. 128), 1963.

As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Mean, Done, World
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1960). “The Leopard”, Pantheon Books

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