Francesco Petrarca Quotes

Gold,silver,gems, fine raiment , a marble palace, well-cultivated fields, paintings, a splendidly caparisoned horse such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and lively companions to us .

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate ...

walk forwards in the radiance of the past

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.

What am I? A scholar? No, hardly that; a lover of woodlands, a solitary, in the habit of uttering disjointed words in the shadow of beech trees, and used to scribbling presumptuously under an immature laurel tree; fervent in toil, but not happy with the results; a lover of letters, but not fully versed in them; an adherent of no sect, but very eager for truth; and because that is hard to find, and because I am a clumsy searcher, often, out of self-distrust, I flee error and fall into doubt, which I hold in lieu of truth. Thus I have finally joined that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, doubts everything - outside of the things that it is sacrilege to doubt.

Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.

To be able to say how much love, is love but little.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

The world's delight is a brief dream.

Learning is my sole delight.

I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow. (Quoted by Josh Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

Love discovered me all weaponless,
and opened the way to the heart through the eyes,
which are made the passageways and doors of tears:
so that it seems to me it does him little honour
to wound me with his arrow, in that state,
he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed

If I believed I could free myself, by dying,
from amorous thoughts that bind me to the earth,
I would already have laid these troubled limbs
and their burden in the earth myself:

Blessed be the eyes that saw her while she lived!" 310

Shame is the fruit of my vanities, and remorse, and the clearest knowledge of how the world's delight is a brief dream.

Vede insieme l'uno e l'altro polo,
Le stelle vaghe e lor viaggio torto;
E vedi, 'I veder nostro quanto e corto.
(You see both poles at once, the travelling stars in their winding courses, and you see just how limited our seeing really is.)

Never would I trade for some new shape
that laurel I was first, in whose sweet shade
all other pleasures vanish in my heart.

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make?

I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.

She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying
her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.
It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;
for death looked lovely in her face.

A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.

Yet have I oft been beaten in the field, And sometimes hurt," said I, "but scorn'd to yield." He smiled and said: "Alas! thou dost not see, My son, how great a flame's prepared for thee.

I wish to go beyond the fire that burns me.

I am possessed by one insatiable passion , which I cannot restrain nor would I if I could ... I cannot get enough books .

Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality.

[He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137
(from Montaigne, On sadness)

Now, what I am, and what I was, I know; I see the seasons in procession go With still increasing speed; while things to come, Unknown, unthought, amid the growing gloom Of long futurity, perplex my soul, While life is posting to its final goal. Mine is the crime, who ought with clearer light To watch the winged years' incessant flight; And not to slumber on in dull delay

Nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

(Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness)

And what is the use of knowing many things if, when you have learned the dimensions of heaven and earth, the measure of the seas, the courses of stars, the virtues of plants and stones, the secrets of nature, you still don't know yourself?