135 Quotes by Luigi Pirandello

Nowhere! It is merely to show you that one is born to life in many forms, in many shapes, as tree, or as stone, as water, as butterfly, or as woman. So one may also be born a character in a play.

Pretending is a virtue. If you cant pretend, you can’t be king.

Have you ever thought to go away and never come back? Run away and lose your tracks, to go to a place far away and start living again, living a new life, only yours, really live? Did you ever think?

Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don’t somehow con- struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don’t construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don’t construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.

A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his special characteristics; for which reason he is always “somebody.” But a man – I’m not speaking of you now – may very well be ‘nobody’.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

Woman – for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: “Blind yourself, for I am blind.”

Personally, I don’t give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.