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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.

— Giacomo Leopardi Zibaldone (1898)

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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.

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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.