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Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

— Giacomo Leopardi

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Philosophy

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 →

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

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There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

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Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

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.