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Quotes from La coscienza di Zeno — Italo Svevo

d. 1928 Austria

← All quotes by Italo Svevo

9 quotes

Life is neither ugly nor beautiful, but it's original!

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

When a man dies, he has too many other worries to allow any thinking about death.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

Healthy love is the love that embraces a single, whole woman, including her character and her intelligence.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

A preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propogandize murder only through wickedness.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten.

La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Italo Svevo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.