Leopardi Zibaldone Quotes

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

Times of trouble demand not tears but counsel.]

Io non ho mai sentito tanto di vivere quanto amando, benché tutto il resto del mondo fosse per me come morto. L’amore è la vita e il principio vivificante della natura, come l’odio il principe distruggente e mortale. Le cose son fatte per amarsi scambievolmente, e la vita nasce da questo.

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.

Everything that is ended, everything that is last, naturally awakens in man a feeling of sorrow and melancholy. At the same time, it excites a pleasurable feeling, pleasurable in that very sorrow, and that is because of the infiniteness of the idea that is contained in the words ended, last, etc. ( Thus by their nature such words are, and always will be, poetic, however ordinary and common they are, in whatever language and style.)

No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought.

As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live,1 because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?

In all our actions, including those that appear selfless, we are in search of some kind of pleasure, even if it is only the pleasure of self-esteem. But while our desire for pleasure is infinite, our mental and physical organs are capable only of limited and temporary pleasures; and this mismatch between desire and capacity dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction. There is no pleasure big or total enough to quench, even momentarily, our thirst for pleasure. But since the absence of pleasure is pain, it follows that we are always in pain, even when we might believe otherwise. And if life is nothing but an unbroken experience of pain, it would be better for every human being never to have been born.

Man for Leopardi is first and foremost an animal, and his history is merely the last section of the much more ancient history of all living species, which in their turn are an integral part of the entire ecological system.

L'irresoluzione è peggio della disperazione.

Non solamente bisogna che il poeta imiti e dipinga a perfezione la natura, ma anche che la imiti e dipinga con naturalezza, anzi non imita la natura chi non la imita con naturalezza.

but clearly the hypothesis, put forth in another note, of a future split into “two kinds of poetry and literature, one for the knowledgeable, the other for ordinary people” (Z 4388) seems now, two centuries later, to be prophetic.

La pazienza è la più eroica delle virtù giusto perché non ha nessuna apparenza d'eroico.

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

La perfetta uguaglianza è la base necessaria della libertà. Vale a dire, è necessario che fra quelli fra' quali il potere è diviso, non vi sia squilibrio di potere; e nessuno ne abbia più né meno di un altro. Perché in questo e non in altro è riposta l'idea, l'essenza e il fondamento della libertà.

La verità, che una cosa sia buona, che un'altra sia cattiva, vale a dire il bene e il male, si credono naturalmente assoluti, e non sono altro che relativi. Quest'è una fonte immensa di errori e volgari e filosofici.

But what came easily to Homer (and to Xenophon, in prose) was no longer easily available to the moderns, who introduced the presence of the representing subject into representation itself (Byron being a prime example in the Zibaldone).

La tartaruga lunghissima nelle sue operazioni ha lunghissima vita. Così tutto è proporzionato nella natura, e la pigrizia della tartaruga di cui si potrebbe accusar la natura non è veramente pigrizia assoluta cioè considerata nella tartaruga ma rispettiva.

La patria moderna dev'essere abbastanza grande, ma non tanto che la comunione d’interessi non vi si possa trovare, come chi ci volesse dare per patria l’Europa. La propria nazione con i suoi confini segnati dalla natura, è la società che ci conviene. E conchiudo che senza amor nazionale non si dà virtù grande.

Modernity, characterized by the diffusion of a written culture, has lost the memory of the oral origins of poetry; this insight is reaffirmed by Leopardi in 1831

There is almost no other absolute truth, except that All is relative. This must be the basis for all metaphysics.

We do not live except by losing. Man is born rich in everything, and as he grows he gets poorer, until in old age he finds himself with almost nothing.

He who hopes fears, and he who despairs fears nothing.

I am, pardon the metaphor, a walking sepulchre, and inside me I carry a dead man, a once very sensitive heart that feels no more,

Nominando i nostri antenati, sogliamo dire, i buoni antichi, i nostri buoni antichi. Tutto il mondo ha opinione che gli antichi fossero migliori di noi, tanto i vecchi che perciò gli lodano, quanto i giovani che perciò li disprezzano. Il certo è che il mondo in questo non s'inganna: il certo è che, senza però pensarvi, egli riconosce e confessa tutto giorno il suo deterioramento. E ciò non solamente con questa frase, ma in cento altri modi; e tuttavia neppur gli viene in pensiero di tornare indietro, anzi non crede onorevole se non l'andare sempre più avanti, e per una delle solite contraddizioni, si persuade e tiene per indubitato, che avanzando migliorerà, e non potrà migliorare se non avanzando; e stimerebbe di esser perduto retrocedendo.

Le altre arti imitano ed esprimono la natura da cui si trae il sentimento, ma la musica non imita e non esprime che lo stesso sentimento in persona, ch’ella trae da se stessa e non dalla natura, e così l’uditore.

In my deeply unhappy life, the least sad time is when I get up. My hopes and illusions for a short time acquire a little more substance, and I call this time the youth of the day for the similarity it shares with youth in life.

As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?

Il più solido piacere di questa vita è il piacere vano delle illusioni. Io considero le illusioni come cosa in certo modo reale state ch’elle sono ingredienti essenziali del sistema della natura umana, e date dalla natura a tutti quanti gli uomini, in maniera che non è lecito spregiarle come sogni di un solo, ma propri veramente dell’uomo e voluti dalla natura, e senza cui la vita nostra sarebbe la più misera e barbara cosa. Onde sono necessari ed entrano sostanzialmente nel composto ed ordine delle cose.

The only reason why praising oneself is odious and is held to be a breach of good manners is because it offends the self-love of the listener. And for that reason pride is a vice in society, and for the same reason humility is cherished and regarded as a virtue.

Gran magistero della natura fu quello d'interrompere, per modo di dire, la vita col sonno. Questa interruzione è quasi una rinnovazione, e il risvegliarsi come un rinascimento. Infatti anche la giornata ha la sua gioventù. Oltre alla gran varietà che nasce da questi continui interrompimenti, che fanno di una vita sola come tante vite. E lo staccare una giornata dall'altra è un sommo rimedio contro la monotonia dell'esistenza. Né questa si poteva diversificare e variare maggiormente, che componendola in gran parte quasi del suo contrario, cioè di una specie di morte.

It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune, such works always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost.

Il piacere umano (così probabilmente quello di ogni essere vivente, in quell'ordine di cose che noi conosciamo) si può dire ch'è sempre futuro, non è se non futuro, consiste solamente nel futuro. L'atto proprio del piacere non si dà. Io spero un piacere; e questa speranza in moltissimi casi si chiama piacere.

La semplicità dev'esser tale che lo scrittore, o chiunque l'adopra in qualsivoglia caso, non si accorga, o mostri di non accorgersi di esser semplice, e molto meno di esser pregevole per questo capo. Egli dev'esser come inconsapevole non solo di tutte le altre bellezze dello scrivere, ma della stessa semplicità.

His discussion of “the humanity of the ancients” is illuminating (Z 441), especially when he speaks with admiration and nostalgia about the right of exile according to which everyone is guaranteed sanctuary at the hearth of every temple or private home; and the respect for wanderers, enemies, the elderly, the dead—that is, for the most fragile casualties of the human condition.

discussions of the effects of globalization. On the psychological and aesthetic level, Leopardi immediately underscores a crucial point: the ancients do not recognize the notion of the morbid satisfaction in suffering that was introduced by Christianity (Z 2456–57), that is, the withdrawal of the self into the bottomless pit of conscience: that typically modern “vague des passions.

Illusions cannot be condemned, despised, and persecuted save by those who are deluded and by those who believe that this world is or truly can be something, and something beautiful. An utterly crucial illusion, and so the half-philosopher combats illusions precisely because he is deluded; the true philosopher loves them and proclaims them because he is not deluded, and combating illusions in general is the surest sign of very imperfect and insufficient wisdom, and notable illusion.

These “thoughts” (the full title is precisely Zibaldone of Thoughts: see Z 4295) are at one and the same time the pulsations that the interior life transmits to the movement of the pen and the traces that are left behind on the paper. Gradually, as the ink dries, these are transformed into archaeological residues or fossils of a provisional state of the soul (self) that the future self will grasp as other than the self, at times not even recognizing the self in them (Z 1766–67, 2488).

Philosophy, independent of religion, is in essence nothing other than a rationalisation of wickedness, and I say that speaking not as a Christian, or as so many apologists for religion have done, but morally. Since everything beautiful and good in the world is pure illusion, virtue, justice, magnanimity, etc., are pure fantasies or products of the imagination, the science that seeks to reveal all those truths, that nature has shrouded in such profound mystery, without putting revealed truths in their place, must of necessity conclude that the only choice in this world is to be completely egoistic and always do whatever profits or pleases us most.

Man is brought to this pass because, just as the goal of life is happiness, and happiness cannot be obtained here below, yet on the other hand a thing cannot help tending toward its necessary goal, and would fail if it lacked hope entirely, so hope, no longer finding any home in this life, finally finds a place beyond it, through the illusion of posterity. Indeed, this is an illusion that is more common in great men, because, while others, who know less about things or reason less and are less logical, and have countless partial disillusionments and disappointments, still continue to hope within the bounds of their life, great men are, on the contrary, firmly persuaded, and very quickly, that is, after only a few experiences, and despair of any actual and real pleasure in this life; and yet [829] needing a goal, and hence the hope of attaining it, and spurred also by their souls to noble deeds, they place their goal, and hope, beyond existence, and feed on this last illusion. Although

Dalla lettura di un pezzo di vera, contemporanea poesia, in versi o in prosa (ma più efficace impressione è quella de’ versi), si può, e forse meglio (anche in questi sì prosaici tempi), dir quello che di un sorriso diceva lo Sterne: che essa aggiunge un filo alla tela brevissima della nostra vita.

Tutto si è perfezionato da Omero in poi, ma non la poesia.

Tutto è follia in questo mondo fuorchè il folleggiare. Tutto è degno di riso fuorchè il ridere di tutto. Tutto è vanità fuorchè le belle illusioni e le dilettevoli frivolezze.

Il che confermerebbe che forme e modi e ritmi della scrittura leopardiana sono mossi dal vento di un pensiero poetante.

To feel life less and to make it seem shorter, that is the greatest good, or rather the greatest reduction of ill and unhappiness which man can obtain.

To enjoy life, a state of despair is necessary.

Happy is he who lays aside his desires, and cherishes and is content with small pleasures, and always goes on hoping, without ever taking account of his own contrary experience, either in general or in particular. And as a result blessed are the modest souls, or those that are distracted and little accustomed to reflection.

man’s unhappiness is always in direct proportion to the progress of his mind, that is, of civilization, since the latter consists of the progress of the mind

One should never make a show of one’s unhappiness: Good fortune alone creates good fortune among men, misfortune was never fortunate, and you cannot traffic in misery, or draw benefit from it, when it is real. No one was ever more respected or more appreciated by being more unhappy than others. And therefore it is expedient for the unfortunate one, if he wants to be well received and accepted, or to be liked, not only to hide his misfortunes but to pretend to be numbered among the fortunate, to assert this claim, to combat the rumor or anyone who challenges him on it, and take great pains to deceive others on this point.

Another resemblance between the world and women. The more sincerely the former and the latter are loved, and the truer and stronger the intention of helping them, and making sacrifices for them, the more certain one may be of not succeeding in any way with them. Hate them, despise them, treat them solely with an eye to one’s own advantages and pleasures—this is the only, the indispensable, means of making progress in love, as in any worldly career, with any person, or society, in any part of life, in any purpose

Ignorance is like a frost, which makes seeds dormant and prevents them from germinating but does not kill them, as civilization does, and once winter has passed and spring arrives, the seeds will germinate.

the history of mankind shows nothing but a continual passage from one degree of civilization to another, then to an excess of civilization, finally to barbarism, and then back to the beginning.

In each place and at each time, one must spend the local currency. He who has none is poor, however rich he might be in other money.

human life is like commerce; it prospers the more the less men, philosophers, etc., interfere with it, the less they try to obtain happiness, and the more they leave to nature.

Man can live only by religion or by illusions. This is a clear and incontestable statement. If you drastically curtail his religion or his illusions, anyone, even a child at the first stage of reasoning (since children live mostly only off their illusions), would definitely kill himself, and our species would of inborn and material necessity be doomed at birth.

Reading is to the art of writing as experience is to the art of living in the world and knowing about other people and other things.

We do not live except by losing. Man is born rich in everything, and as he grows he gets poorer, until in old age he finds himself with almost nothing.

Are we born, then, only to feel what happiness it would be had we not been born?

Nature is fully displayed before us, naked and open. To know it well there is no need to lift any veil covering it. What is needed is to remove the impediments and distortions which are in our eyes and in our intellect, and these created and caused for us by ourselves with our reasoning.

he who does not reason, does not err.

Everything is madness in this world except being mad. Everything is worthy of being laughed at except laughing at everything. Everything is vanity except fine illusions and pleasurable frivolities.

without imagination this life is a massacre, and the most extreme misfortune becomes even worse and resembles hell itself when you are stripped of the shadow of illusion that nature is always wont to leave us.

The full perfectibility of man is in knowing that he is in fact incapable of perfection, indeed, that, having emerged substantially perfect from the hand of nature, by changing he can only change for the worse.

What is life? The journey of a crippled and sick man walking with a heavy load on his back up steep mountains and through wild, rugged, arduous places, in snow, ice, rain, wind, burning sun, for many days without ever resting night and day to end at a precipice or ditch, in which inevitably he falls.

We spend our youth in pursuit of riches or fame, in hopes to enjoy them when we are old: and when we are old, we find it is too late to enjoy anything.

What is man? An animal more capable of habituation than others.

There is no human unhappiness that cannot increase.

So vain and hollow is the glory for which men strive, that not only does it depend upon fortune, not only does it extend to a very few who scholarly and aware of ancient things, not only does the slenderest of chances suffice to obstruct or suppress it, not only does it very often go to the undeserving, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., but the very fact of seeking it, the very fact of obtaining it is a reason for losing it.

The most certain way of concealing the limits of your knowledge is never to exceed them.

Two truths that men will generally 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.

Illusions are natural, inherent to the system of the world. When they are removed completely or almost completely, man is denatured, and every denatured people is barbarous, for things can no longer run as the system of the world requires. Reason is a light; nature seeks to be illuminated by reason, not burned.

every sacrifice of something dear, every difficult sacrifice, is a form of heroism, even the sacrifice of virtue, and of the most sacred feelings, even though this sacrifice comes at a cost.

He who can pasture on little joys, and gather in his heart the little pleasures he has experienced during the day, and give importance within himself to his little strokes of good fortune passes easily through life, and if he is not happy he can believe he is, and be unaware that he is not. But he who thinks only of great joys, who does not count as a gain, and does not try to pasture and ruminate on pleasant little incidents, little successes, satisfactions, achievements, etc., and thinks that all is nothing, if he does not attain that great and difficult goal that he has set himself, will always live in anger, anxiety, without enjoyments, and instead of great happiness will find continuous unhappiness. Especially when, having perhaps attained that great goal, he finds it vastly inferior to what he hoped for, as always happens with things that have been desired and sought after for a long time.

And why, if the world is made for happiness, would truth not make us happy? Yet I say that happiness consists in ignorance of the truth.

Truth is never part of the beginning but only of the end of human affairs.

reason is so barbarous that wherever it gains the upper hand and becomes the absolute rule, whatever premise it starts from, and on whatever basis it is established, everything else will become barbarous.

The analysis of things spells the death of their beauty or greatness and the death of poetry.

In any case, it is very mistaken to conclude, upon seeing someone who does not know how to speak, that he does not know how to think, that he is uncultivated, etc. One can speak like a blockhead, extremely coldly and trivially, etc., and be the foremost man of science, thinker, writer in the world.

Only with arrogance can one live in the world. If you do not wish or know how to use arrogance, others will use it against you. So be arrogant. The same goes for imposture.

Someone used to say that coming into this life, we are like a man who lies down on a hard bed. He feels uncomfortable in it, cannot keep still, he tosses and turns a hundred times. In various ways he endeavors to smoothe out, to soften, etc., the bed, always trying and hoping to be able to rest and get to sleep until, not having slept or feeling rested at all, the hour comes when he has to get up. Such and for a similar reason is our restlessness in life, our natural and justified discontent with every state; the efforts and exertions, etc., of a thousand different kinds to make ourselves comfortable and to soften this bed of ours a little; hopes of happiness or at least of some repose, and death which arrives before our hopes come to anything.

Natural law varies according to the nature of different creatures. A horse, not being carnivorous, will perhaps judge a wolf that attacks and kills a sheep to be unjust. It will hate it for its bloodthirstiness and will feel a sense of horror if it chances to see some example of its butchery. Not so a lion. Moral good and evil, therefore, have nothing absolute about them. The only wicked acts are those which are repugnant to the inclinations of each kind of operative being, nor are those acts wicked which harm other beings but are not repugnant to the nature of the one who performs them.

I am, pardon the metaphor, a walking sepulchre, and inside me I carry a dead man, a once very sensitive heart that feels no more

A person who does not know nature, knows nothing, and is incapable of reasoning, no matter how reasonable he may be.

Il mio sistema introduce non solo uno scetticismo ragionato e dimostrato, ma tale che, secondo il mio sistema, la ragione umana, per qualsivoglia progresso possibile, non potrà mai spogliarsi di questo scetticismo; anzi esso contiene il vero, e si dimostra che la nostra ragione non può assolutamente trovare il vero se non dubitando; ch'ella si allontana dal vero ogni volta che giudica con certezza; e che non solo il dubbio giova a scoprire il vero (secondo il principio di Cartesio ec. v. Dutens, par.1. c.2. §.10.), ma il vero consiste essenzialmente nel dubbio, e chi dubita sa, e sa il più che si possa sapere. (8 Sett. 1821)

It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom, and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune (whether on account of lofty, powerful passions or something else), such works always bring consolation, [260] and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost. And so, while that which is seen in the reality of things grieves and kills the soul, when seen in imitation or any other form in works of genius (e.g., in lyric poetry, which is not, properly speaking, imitation), it opens and revives the heart. In fact, just as the author who described and felt so powerfully the vanity of illusions, but still preserved a great fund of them and gave ample proof of this by conveying their vanity so accurately (see pp. 214–15), in the same way, the reader, however disillusioned both about himself and about what he reads, is yet drawn by the author into the same deception and illusion that he experienced and that are hidden in the most intimate recesses of his spirit. And the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius." from "Zibaldone

filosofi in parole e in opere,

Ella è cosa forse o poco o nulla o non abbastanza osservata che la speranza è una passione, un modo di essere, così inerente e inseparabile dal sentimento della vita, cioè dalla vita propriamente detta, come il pensiero, e come l'amor di se stesso, e il desiderio del proprio bene. Io vivo, dunque io spero, è un sillogismo giustissimo,

Felicità da me provata nel tempo [4418]del comporre, il miglior tempo ch'io abbia passato in mia vita, e nel quale mi contenterei di durare finch'io vivo. Passar le giornate senza accorgermene; parermi le ore cortissime, e maravigliarmi sovente io medesimo di tanta facilità di passarle.

È cosa notata che il gran dolore (come ogni grande passione) non ha linguaggio esterno.

[446] Man distances himself from nature, and therefore from happiness, when by dint of experiences of every kind that he should not have had and which nature has ordained that he should not have (because it has been seen a thousand times that nature conceals itself as much as possible,1 placing millions of obstacles in the way of the knowledge of reality), by dint of connections, traditions, discussion with others, etc., man’s reasoning begins to acquire other information, it begins to compare and finally to deduce other conclusions, both from natural information and from that which he should not have obtained. And thus, as his beliefs alter, whether they lead to the

truth or to errors that are no longer natural, man’s natural state alters, too. Because his actions no longer come from natural beliefs, they are no longer natural. He no longer obeys his primitive inclinations because he no longer thinks it necessary, nor does he draw the natural consequence from them, etc. And in this way, altered man, that is, man who has become imperfect in relation to his own nature, becomes unhappy.

What poets must seem to display, besides the objects imitated, is a beautiful negligence.

he is one of those good teachers who “are capable of retracing in detail, and holding accurately in their minds the origins, progress, mode of development, in short, the history of their own notions and thoughts, their knowledge and their intellect” (Z 1376).

Passions, deaths, storms, etc., give us great pleasure in spite of their ugliness for the simple reason that they are well imitated, and if what Parini says in his Oration on poetry1 is true, this is because man hates nothing more than he does boredom, and therefore he enjoys seeing something new, however ugly.

poets today have no other readers but persons who are educated and informed,” but unfortunately “[t]oday every educated and informed man is unfailingly egoistic and philosophical, deprived of every noteworthy illusion, devoid of intense passions, and every woman likewise” (Z 2944–45).

poetry returns to us from the depths of a wounded psyche, no longer in harmony with the world—and following this road we will meet up with Baudelaire and much of modern poetry.

preliterate authors, such as Homer, who cannot be grammatically constrained,

one’s own past self (our/his childhood) and of bringing to light the relics of the childhood of humankind itself (Z 4302). Far from wanting to recirculate dead and devitalized forms—either in language or in existence—Leopardi uses the metaphor of fresh fruit preserved in winter,

may be known, but is in no way felt” (Z 1099) and the youthful illusions (l’inganno giovanile) that survive into old age (

from the idea of nature as a “fixed” and harmonious order that can be subjected to classification and mathematical description to an idea of nature that is run through with continual transformations, something that is living and historicized even while it works according to recognizable laws and is animated by recognizable forces.