Giacomo Gianniotti Quotes

The longer you remain in Rome,' said [Cardinal] S.C., 'the smaller you will find it. ~ Giacomo Casanova

No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

I have had friends who have acted kindly towards me, and it has been my good fortune to have it in my power to give them substantial proofs of my gratitude. ~ Giacomo Casanova

When you fool a fool you strike a blow for intelligence. ~ Giacomo Casanova

The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public. ~ Giacomo Puccini

They did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress. ~ Giacomo Balla

I always made my food congenial to my constitution, and my health was always excellent. ~ Giacomo Casanova

For if life, once empty of attachments
and sweet illusions, is a starless winter night,
still it's enough for me of mortal fate
and comfort and revenge that I can lie here
lazy, lifeless on the grass,
watching the sea and earth and sky, and smile. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

For all of my fortune, there are many with misfortune that need a hand. ~ Laura San Giacomo

So, ignorant of man and of the age
that he calls ancient, and of the descendants
following their ancestors,
nature stays evergreen; indeed she travels
such a long road she might as well
be standing still. Meanwhile kingdoms fall,
languages and peoples die; she doesn't see.
Yet man takes it upon himself to praise eternity. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most of
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to founder in this sea is sweet to me. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

There's always the question of what is good and evil and the gray area in between where that most people live. In everyday life, things aren't black or white, but rather there's a lot of coping and really tough decision making. ~ Laura San Giacomo

I lived for art, I lived for love ~ Giacomo Puccini

There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

The world laughs at things it would really prefer to admire, and like Aesop's fox it criticizes things it covets. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

Be the flame, not the moth. ~ Giacomo Casanova

The same principle that forbids me to lie does not allow me to tell the truth. ~ Giacomo Casanova

The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned. ~ Giacomo Casanova

one who makes no mistakes makes nothing ~ Giacomo Casanova

If the best company is that which we leave feeling most satisfied with ourselves, it follows that it is the company we leave most bored. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

A man who makes known his love by words is a fool. ~ Giacomo Casanova

Si! Today there was a report from scientists who have spent their entire lives studying chimpanzees and you know what they said? They said the monkeys are learning to make spears! They've never been able to make weapons before but now, now, all of a sudden they can!" She gave him an ominous look and took the lid off the pot of boiling water. "Mark my words, Giacomo. They're doing it for a reason. The next thing you know, they'll be coming after us."
"Mmm. That will be bad."
"Si, very bad." She threw the pasta into the pot. "But I will be ready for them. ~ Suzanne Harper

I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing ... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place. ~ Morris L. West

Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. ~ Giacomo Casanova

I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent. ~ Giacomo Casanova

Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy. ~ Giacomo Casanova

If content with himself and mankind, a man is never harsh or curt. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

Man is free; but not unless he believes he is[.] ~ Giacomo Casanova

Man is doomed either squander his youth, which is the only time he has to store provisions for the coming years and provide for his own well-being, or to spend his youth procuring pleasures in advance for that time of life when he will be too old to enjoy them. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

She'd never forgotten their last night in Seoul, or above it in fact, surveying the city lights from atop Namsan Mountain. ~ Giacomo Lee

Love is only a feeling of curiousity more or less intense, grafted upon the inclination placed in us by nature that the species may be preserved. ~ Giacomo Casanova

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

THE MAN WHO MAKES NO MISTAKES USUALLY MAKES NOTHING ~ Giacomo Casanova

We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings. ~ Morris L. West

The raging fire which urged us on was scorching us; it would have burned us had we failed to restrain it. ~ Giacomo Casanova

The source of love, as I learned later, is a curiosity which, combined with the inclination which nature is obliged to give us in order to preserve itself. […] Hence women make no mistake in taking such pains over their person and their clothing, for it is only by these that they can arouse a curiosity to read them in those whom nature at their birth declared worthy of something better than blindness. […] As time goes on a man who has loved many women, all of them beautiful, reaches the point of feeling curious about ugly women if they are new to him. He sees a painted woman. The paint is obvious to him, but it does not put him off. His passion, which has become a vice, is ready with the fraudulent title page. 'It is quite possible,' he tells himself, 'that the book is not as bad as all that; indeed, it may have no need of this absurd artifice.' He decides to scan it, he tries to turn over the pages - but no! the living book objects; it insists on being read properly, and the 'egnomaniac' becomes a victim of coquetry, the monstrous persecutor of all men who ply the trade of love.

You, Sir, who are a man of intelligence and have read these least twenty lines, which Apollo drew from my pen, permit me to tell you that if they fail to disillusion you, you are lost - that is, you will be the victim of the fair sex to the last moment of your life. If that prospect pleases you, I congratulate you ~ Giacomo Casanova

Art is a kind of illness. ~ Giacomo Puccini

If you refuse me, I shall be compelled to believe that you are cruelly enjoying my misery, and that you have learned in the most accursed school that the best way of preventing a young man from curing himself of an amorous passion is to excite it constantly; but you must agree with me that, to put such tyranny in practice, it is necessary to hate the person it is practised upon, and, if that be so, I ought to call upon my reason to give me the strength necessary to hate you likewise. ~ Giacomo Casanova

There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical. ~ Giacomo Leopardi