Giacomo Leopardi: Frasi in inglese

Stato che sia, dentro covile o cuna,
È funesto a chi nasce il dì natale.
Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia (Night song of a nomadic shepherd in Asia) (1829-1830). Translation by Eamon Grennan, Leopardi: Selected Poems [Princeton University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-691-01644-5], p. 62
Poetry

“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.”

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Giacomo Leopardi libro Zibaldone

1832. Passions. Translation by Tim Parks. [Yale University Press, 2014, ISBN 9780300186338], p. 8
Zibaldone (1898)

“My philosophy isn’t only not conducive to misanthropy, as it might appear to a superficial reader, and as many have accused me. It essentially rules out misanthropy, it tends toward healing, to dissolving discontent and hatred. Not knee-jerk hatred but the deep-dyed hatred that unreflective people who would deny being misanthropes so cordially bear (habitually or on select occasions) toward their own kind in response to hurts they receive—as we all do, justly or not—from others. My philosophy holds nature guilty of everything, it acquits mankind completely and directs our hate, or at least our lamentations, to its matrix, to the true origin of the afflictions living creatures suffer, etc.”

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Giacomo Leopardi libro Zibaldone

2nd January, 1829. Translation by W. S. Di Piero.
Zibaldone (1898)

“No one can truthfully boast or say in anger: I cannot be unhappier than I am.”

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Giacomo Leopardi libro Zibaldone

13-14th August 1821.
Zibaldone (1898)

“Whilst they discussed these and similar questions, two lions are said to have suddenly appeared. The beasts were so enfeebled and emaciated with hunger that they were scarcely able to devour the Icelander. They accomplished the feat however, and thus gained sufficient strength to live to the end of the day.”

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Giacomo Leopardi

Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander

“ICELANDER: So say all the philosophers. But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which hitherto no philosopher has satisfied me? 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?”

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Giacomo Leopardi

Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander

“ICELANDER: Thus I reply to you. I am well aware you did not make the world for the service of men. It were easier to believe that you made it expressly as a place of torment for them. But tell me: why am I here at all? Did I ask to come into the world? Or am I here unnaturally, contrary to your will? If however, you yourself have placed me here, without giving me the power of acceptance or refusal of this gift of life, ought you not as far as possible to try and make me happy, or at least preserve me from the evils and dangers, which render my sojourn a painful one? And what I say of myself, I say of the whole human race, and of every living creature.”

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Giacomo Leopardi

Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander

“NATURE: So flees the squirrel from the rattlesnake, and runs in its haste deliberately into the mouth of its tormentor. I am that from which thou fleest.”

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Giacomo Leopardi

Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander

“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.”

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Giacomo Leopardi

Thoughts. Translation by J.G. Nichols [Hesperus Press, 2002, ISBN 9781843910121], p. 6
Aphorisms

“[T]he recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius. And the spectacle of nothingness is itself a thing in these works, and seems to enlarge the reader’s soul, to raise it up and to make it take satisfaction in itself and its despair.”

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Giacomo Leopardi libro Zibaldone

260, 5th October 1820. Translation by Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino et al. [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, ISBN 9780141194400], p. 177
Zibaldone (1898)