Giacomo Leopardi Quotes
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No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance.
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Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.
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Death is not evil, for it frees man from all ills and takes away his desires along with desire's rewards.
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The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.
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Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.
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Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.
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Man is doomed either squander his youth, which is the only time he has to store provisions for the coming years and provide for his own well-being, or to spend his youth procuring pleasures in advance for that time of life when he will be too old to enjoy them.
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The greater part of the people we assign to educate our sons we know for certain are not educated. Yet we do not doubt that they can give what they have not received, a thing which cannot be otherwise acquired.
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If content with himself and mankind, a man is never harsh or curt.
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Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.
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Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.
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Since the world never faults a man who refuses to yield...it is generally recognized that weak men live in obedience to the world's will, while the strong obey only their own.
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It's interesting to observe that almost all truly worthy men have simple manners, and that simple manners are almost always taken as a sign of little worth
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The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.
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No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it.
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Of men eternally dear! happy indeed If you have breathing-space From pain: blessed all the more If death should heal you of the pain you fear!
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There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical.
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The end of pain we take as happiness.
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People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.
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The artisan or scientist or the follower of whatever discipline who has the habit of comparing himself not with other followers but with the discipline itself will have a lower opinion of himself, the more excellent he is.
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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.
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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.
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He who doubts, knows - knows as much as can be known.
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Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again --
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I may be wrong, but it seems rare in our age to find a widely praised person whose own mouth is not the source of that praise.
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Ignorance is the greatest source of happiness.
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I find it awfully difficult to determine if the habit of talking about oneself at length runs contrary to the basic rules of propriety, or if instead the man exempt from this vice is rare.
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Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.
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Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.
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The commonplace expression that life is nothing but a play is verified above all in this: the world speaks absolutely consistently in one way and acts absolutely consistently in another.
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