Cesare Borgia Quotes

Impossible loves. I am very much afraid they can become an addiction. ~ Cesare Borgia

I will lead mankind into a new world! You cannot kill me! No man can murder me! ~ Cesare Borgia

Hearts can deceive. Words can deceive. But eyes we should trust. ~ Cesare Borgia

The constellations this year seem unfavourable to rebels. ~ Cesare Borgia

I have taken care of everything in the course of my life, only not for death, and now I have to die completely unprepared. ~ Cesare Borgia

One enemy at the time. ~ Sarah Dunant

(About Cesare Borgia) What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes? Such was the man that Machiavel prefers to all the great geniuses of his time, and to the heroes of antiquity, and of which he finds the life and action make a good example for those that fortune favors. ~ Frederick The Great

One must look for one thing only, to find many. ~ Cesare Pavese

Don't mix wine and women. ~ Cesare Pavese

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce. ~ Cesare Pavese

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish. ~ Cesare Pavese

All is the same
time has gone by
some day you come
some day you'll die
someone has died
long time ago. ~ Cesare Pavese

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come. ~ Cesare Pavese

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh. ~ Cesare Pavese

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties. ~ Cesare Pavese

Can we just do this?" Ray asked tightly, clinging to Zheng's already slightly elongated arm. Because Louis-Cesare wasn't the only one with a master power around here.
"Let go," Zheng told him. "I'm the rubber band; you're the spitball. And spitballs don't hold on to rubber bands."
"Die in a fire," Ray told him savagely. But he let go. ~ Karen Chance

If I'm not supposed to be awake, why are you here?" I mumbled.
"To be the little spoon. ~ Karen Chance

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night? ~ Cesare Pavese

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it. ~ Cesare Pavese

Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister. Now, when [Pedro Calderon] shuts his eyes, he cannot see anything else. ~ Sarah Dunant

He was a handsome man, not in the way of mercurial Cesare or the false angel, Morozzi, but with a calm steadiness that sat well upon him and shown in everything he did. The creations he drew from fire and air were possessed of great delicacy, but I was coming to realize that the man himself was as an oak, unshakable in the greatest storm. ~ Sara Poole

We saw also an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady for whom I have always entertained the highest respect, on account of her rare histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid gold goblets made of gilded wood, her high distinction as an operatic screamer, and the facility with which she could order a sextuple funeral and get the corpses ready for it. ~ Mark Twain

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go. ~ Cesare Pavese

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence. ~ Cesare Pavese

I cocked an ear, but there was nothing much to hear. A girl was on the phone next door, complaining about some guy to a girlfriend, and someone down a floor was either talking to his cat or having a psychotic episode, but both voices were clearer than the soft noises coming from the living room. The vamps were presumably cleaning the wounds better than I'd been able to do at the bar, and bandaging him up. I knew nobody was planning a snack– it would be like offering people used to Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon a sack of stale Fritos and a flat Coke. Sloppy seconds weren't likely to appeal. ~ Karen Chance

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny . ~ Cesare Pavese

I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding. ~ Cesare Pavese

In the world of football and of sport in general there is still a taboo around homosexuality. Everyone ought to live freely with themselves, their desires and their sentiments. We must all work for a sporting culture that respects the individual in every manifestation of his truth and freedom. ~ Cesare Prandelli

We obtain things when we no longer want them. ~ Cesare Pavese

This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing the imperial ruins, their insistent teeth pulling weeds - and mortar - from between the stones of history. A city still struggling with a chasm of hardship between rich and poor, still ripped apart by gross family violence. But also a place of growing magnificence and confidence where, for the first time in centuries, the future no longer looks bleaker than the past, and where the new Pope has chosen for himself a name designed to foster a belief in magnificence again. Alexander ~ Sarah Dunant

The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away. ~ Cesare Pavese

[G]enius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity . . . ~ Cesare Lombroso

Love is the cheapest of religions. ~ Cesare Pavese

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word. ~ Cesare Pavese

She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off. ~ Cesare Pavese

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities. ~ Cesare Pavese

Louis-Cesare looked pained. Ray was even dirtier than I was, and his bright red briefs had gotten a tear across the butt at some point, flashing a glimpse of hairy cheek whenever he moved. An awesome trophy he was not. ~ Karen Chance

Beggar: There was a time when we didn't exist, Oedipus. That means that even the deepest desires of our heart, our blood, our moments of awakening have sprung from nothing. Even your desire to escape destiny is perhaps destiny. It isn't we who made our own blood. It's enough to feel it and live like free man, as the oracle bids us.
Oedipus: Yes, so long as a man is still searching. You had the luck never to reach your goal. But the day comes when you go back to Cithaeron, you forget everything and the mountain seems to bring back your childhood. You look at it day after day and maybe you climb it. Then someone tells you that you were born up there. And everything crumbles. ~ Cesare Pavese

At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death. ~ Cesare Pavese

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone ... ~ Cesare Pavese

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.) ~ Cesare Pavese

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. ~ Cesare Pavese

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first. ~ Cesare Pavese

No man ever freely surrendered a portion of his own liberty for the sake of the public good; such a chimera appears only in fiction. If it were possible, we would each prefer that the pacts binding others did not bind us; every man sees himself as the centre of all the world's affairs. ~ Cesare Beccaria

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative? ~ Cesare Pavese