18 Quotes by Francesco Petrarca

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?

I stop, then, in my tracks, to recollect the awesome presence that I’ve left behind, the road ahead so long, my life so short, and bow my head and burst out into tears. While.

How much I envy you, you greedy earth, who get to clasp the one who’s taken from me, and keep me from the air of her sweet face in which I once found peace from all my war! How.

I cannot have a sufficiency of books. Indeed, I have more than I should... Books give utter delight: they talk with us... and are bound to us by lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates a longing for another.

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.

Everything else, every thought, goes fore and forever fades away into the recesses of time, and therein what remains is my soul’s love for you.

Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.

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?

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