135 Quotes by Luigi Pirandello

Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you’ll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!

A fact is like a sack which won’t stand up if it’s empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which caused it to exist.

For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers;.

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be – like the reality of yesterday – an illusion tomorrow.

Was it really my own, that image glimpsed in a flash? Am I really like that, from the outside, when – all the while living – I do not think of myself? For others, then, I am that stranger whom I surprised in a mirror; I am he and not the I whom I know; I am that one there whom I myself at first, upon becoming aware of him, did not recognize. I am that stranger whom I am unable to see living except like that, in a thoughtless second. A stranger whom others alone can see and know, not I.

Men – do you understand? – have need of building a house even for their sentiments. It is not enough for them to have those sentiments within them, in their hearts; they want to see them outside, as well, so that they can touch them; and so, they proceed to build them a house.

Woe to him who doesn’t know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!

You don’t know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.

But I now felt that I could no longer patch things up, either with myself or with anyone.