More by Petrarch
Understand me who can, for I understand myself.
Il Canzoniere (1351)
Man has no greater enemy than himself. I have acted contrary to my sentiments and inclination; throughout our whole lives we do what we never intended, and what we proposed to do, we leave undone.
An Examination of the Advantages of Solitude and of Its Operations (1808)
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
Notable Thoughts About Women : A Literary Mosaic (1882)
Sleep is truly, as they say, akin to death, and relieves the heart of the sweet care that keeps it in life.
Il Canzoniere (1351)
No one, it seems to me, can hope to equal Augustine. Who, nowadays, could hope to equal one who, in my judgment, was the greatest in an age fertile in great minds?
To those who are given to virtue, the boast of titles is wholly alien and distasteful.
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
De remediis utriusque fortunae (1354)
You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now.
Il Canzoniere (1351)
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