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

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.

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

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

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.

Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace.

There are some centuries which – apart from everything else – in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

Fate gave birth at one and the same time to two siblings, Love and Death.

It’s not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

Non t’accorgi, Diavolo, che tu sei bella come un Angelo?