Luigi Pirandello Quotes - Page 2

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Refusing to have an opinion is a way of having one, isn't it?

As soon as one is born, one starts dying.

We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can't make it think.

When you say you are in love with humanity, you are well satisfied with yourself.

Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!

It is much easier to be a hero than a gentleman.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them.

When [man] is happy he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right.

One cannot choose what he writes - one can only choose to face it.

None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.

If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

A fact is like a sack which won't stand up if it's empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which caused it to exist.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

The facts are to blame, my friend. We are all imprisoned by facts: I was born, I exist.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!

Personally, I don't give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.

Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.

The more arms and legs [children] we have, the richer we are.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.