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

— Giacomo Leopardi

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More quotes by Giacomo Leopardi

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)

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?

It were more reasonable that you [Nature] made happiness a necessity; or this being impossible, it were better not to bring men into the world.

Being asked for what purpose he thought men were born, he laughingly replied: To realize how much better it were not to be born.

All Giacomo Leopardi quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Giacomo Leopardi (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.