Zibaldone
Giacomo Leopardi
Top 10 Best Quotes
“As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live,1 because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?”
“In all our actions, including those that appear selfless, we are in search of some kind of pleasure, even if it is only the pleasure of self-esteem. But while our desire for pleasure is infinite, our mental and physical organs are capable only of limited and temporary pleasures; and this mismatch between desire and capacity dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction. There is no pleasure big or total enough to quench, even momentarily, our thirst for pleasure. But since the absence of pleasure is pain, it follows that we are always in pain, even when we might believe otherwise. And if life is nothing but an unbroken experience of pain, it would be better for every human being never to have been born.”
“Times of trouble demand not tears but counsel.]”
“Man is brought to this pass because, just as the goal of life is happiness, and happiness cannot be obtained here below, yet on the other hand a thing cannot help tending toward its necessary goal, and would fail if it lacked hope entirely, so hope, no longer finding any home in this life, finally finds a place beyond it, through the illusion of posterity. Indeed, this is an illusion that is more common in great men, because, while others, who know less about things or reason less and are less logical, and have countless partial disillusionments and disappointments, still continue to hope within the bounds of their life, great men are, on the contrary, firmly persuaded, and very quickly, that is, after only a few experiences, and despair of any actual and real pleasure in this life; and yet [829] needing a goal, and hence the hope of attaining it, and spurred also by their souls to noble deeds, they place their goal, and hope, beyond existence, and feed on this last illusion. Although”
“It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune, such works always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost.”
“As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?”
“he is one of those good teachers who “are capable of retracing in detail, and holding accurately in their minds the origins, progress, mode of development, in short, the history of their own notions and thoughts, their knowledge and their intellect” (Z 1376).”
“What poets must seem to display, besides the objects imitated, is a beautiful negligence.”
“Philosophy, independent of religion, is in essence nothing other than a rationalisation of wickedness, and I say that speaking not as a Christian, or as so many apologists for religion have done, but morally. Since everything beautiful and good in the world is pure illusion, virtue, justice, magnanimity, etc., are pure fantasies or products of the imagination, the science that seeks to reveal all those truths, that nature has shrouded in such profound mystery, without putting revealed truths in their place, must of necessity conclude that the only choice in this world is to be completely egoistic and always do whatever profits or pleases us most.”
“Passions, deaths, storms, etc., give us great pleasure in spite of their ugliness for the simple reason that they are well imitated, and if what Parini says in his Oration on poetry1 is true, this is because man hates nothing more than he does boredom, and therefore he enjoys seeing something new, however ugly.”
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Book Keywords:
consolation, pessimism, death, procreation, childfree, antinatalism, genius, misfortune, mother, illusions, natural-beauty, ethics, disenchantment, poetry, unhappiness, bitter, birth, philosophy, despair, discouragement, nothingness
