47 Quotes by Italo Svevo

Egli la vide dinanzi a sé come su un altare, la personificazione del pensiero e del dolore e l'amò sempre, se amore è ammirazione e desiderio. Ella rappresentava tutto quello di nobile ch'egli in quel periodo avesse pensato od osservato.

A novelist who ranks with Proust, Kafka, Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

To kill someone, even treacherously is more manly than to wound a friend by betraying his confidence.

You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.

Pain and love – the whole of life, in short – cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer.

Whenever I look at a mountain I always expect it to turn into a volcano.

The fancies of wine are authentic events.

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness.