Quotes from Zibaldone — Giacomo Leopardi
1798–1837 Italy
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5 quotes
Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present.
Zibaldone (1898)
Children find everything in nothing, men find nothing in everything.
Zibaldone (1898)
No one can truthfully boast or say in anger: I cannot be unhappier than I am.
Zibaldone (1898)
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.
Zibaldone (1898)
I found myself desperately bored with life, with a very strong desire to kill myself, and had an intimation of something bad, which frightened me at the very moment that I wanted to die, and placed me immediately in a state of apprehension and anxiety. I have never felt so strongly the absolute conflict of the elements that form the present human condition, forced to fear for its life and to seek at all costs to preserve it, just then when it was most burdensome, and when it could resolve to be ended by its own will (but by no other cause).
Zibaldone (1898)