Italo Svevo Quotes

You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.

There are three things I always forget. Names, faces and... the third I can't remember.

Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance.

Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness

Pain and love - the whole of life, in short - cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer.

Whenever I look at a mountain I always expect it to turn into a volcano.

It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.

To kill someone, even treacherously is more manly than to wound a friend by betraying his confidence.

Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction.

Misunderstanding women is a clear sign of scant virility.

Health doesn't analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.

And it is true that life lacks the monotony of museums. There come days which seem worthy of being framed, but they are so full of conflicting sounds, of line and color and living, burning light that they never become tedious.

Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

The fancies of wine are authentic events.

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.