Giacomo Leopardi quotes

Giacomo Leopardi was an Italian poet, philosopher, and essayist, considered one of the most significant literary figures of the 19th century. His works deeply explored themes of existential despair, love, nature, and the human condition. He became a key figure in European Romanticism and left a lasting impact on Italian literature. Here are 25 of his quotes:

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi

Children find everything in nothing, men find nothing in everything.

Giacomo Leopardi

Death is not evil, for it frees man from all ills and takes away his desires along with desire's rewards.

Giacomo Leopardi

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.

Giacomo Leopardi

No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance.

Giacomo Leopardi

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

Giacomo Leopardi

Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again.

Giacomo Leopardi

What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go contemplating wastelands; then you set.

Giacomo Leopardi

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.

Giacomo Leopardi

Two truths that most men will never believe: one that we know nothing, the other that we are nothing. Add the third, which depends a lot on the second: that there is nothing to hope for after death.

Giacomo Leopardi

My philosophy isn't only not conducive to misanthropy, as it might appear to a superficial reader, and as many have accused me. It essentially rules out misanthropy, it tends toward healing, to dissolving discontent and hatred. Not knee-jerk hatred but the deep-dyed hatred that unreflective people who would deny being misanthropes so cordially bear (habitually or on select occasions) toward their own kind in response to hurts they receive-as we all do, justly or not-from others. My philosophy holds nature guilty of everything, it acquits mankind completely and directs our hate, or at least our lamentations, to its matrix, to the true origin of the afflictions living creatures suffer, etc.

Giacomo Leopardi

No one can truthfully boast or say in anger: I cannot be unhappier than I am.

Giacomo Leopardi

Everything is evil. I mean, everything that is, is wicked; every existing thing is an evil; everything exists for a wicked end. Existence is a wickedness and is ordained for wickedness. Evil is the end, the final purpose, of the universe...The only good is nonbeing; the only really good thing is the thing that is not, things that are not things; all things are bad.

Giacomo Leopardi

It seems as though death were the essential aim of all things. That which has no existence cannot die; yet all that exists has proceeded from nothing. The final cause of existence is not happiness, for nothing is happy. It is true, living creatures seek this end in all their works, but none obtain it; and during all their life, ever deceiving, tormenting, and exerting themselves, they suffer indeed for no other purpose than to die.

Giacomo Leopardi

Whilst they discussed these and similar questions, two lions are said to have suddenly appeared. The beasts were so enfeebled and emaciated with hunger that they were scarcely able to devour the Icelander. They accomplished the feat however, and thus gained sufficient strength to live to the end of the day.

Giacomo Leopardi

ICELANDER: So say all the philosophers. But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which hitherto no philosopher has satisfied me? For whose pleasure and service is this wretched life of the world maintained, by the suffering and death of all the beings which compose it?

Giacomo Leopardi

ICELANDER: Thus I reply to you. I am well aware you did not make the world for the service of men. It were easier to believe that you made it expressly as a place of torment for them. But tell me: why am I here at all? Did I ask to come into the world? Or am I here unnaturally, contrary to your will? If however, you yourself have placed me here, without giving me the power of acceptance or refusal of this gift of life, ought you not as far as possible to try and make me happy, or at least preserve me from the evils and dangers, which render my sojourn a painful one? And what I say of myself, I say of the whole human race, and of every living creature.

Giacomo Leopardi

NATURE: So flees the squirrel from the rattlesnake, and runs in its haste deliberately into the mouth of its tormentor. I am that from which thou fleest.

Giacomo Leopardi

Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present.

Giacomo Leopardi

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.

Giacomo Leopardi

To that creature, being born, Its birthday is a day to mourn.

Giacomo Leopardi

Rest for ever (heart) enough Hast thou throbbed. Nothing is worth Thy agitations, nor of sighs is worthy The earth. Bitterness and vexation Is life, never aught besides, and mire the world. Quiet thyself henceforth. Despair For the last time. To our race fate Has given but death. Henceforth despise Thyself, nature, the foul Power which, hidden, rules to the common bane, And the infinite vanity of the whole.

Giacomo Leopardi