104 Quotes by Giacomo Leopardi

So the peak of human knowledge or philosophy is to recognize its own uselessness – if man were still the same as he was in the beginning – and to undo the damage that it has done, and return man to the condition in which he would always have been if it had never existed.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation’s childhood is its mythical age.

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

The artist’s conception of his art or the scientist’s of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.

Men are wretched by necessity, and determined to believe themselves wretched by accident.