Top 60 Giacomo Leopardi Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Ignorance is the greatest source of happiness.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

2. “The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

3. “He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

4. “Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul’s boundless needs.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

5. “Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

6. “Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

7. “In all climates, under all skies, man’s happiness is always somewhere else.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

8. “It’s interesting to observe that almost all truly worthy men have simple manners, and that simple manners are almost always taken as a sign of little worth.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

9. “Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again –.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

10. “Non t’accorgi, Diavolo, che tu sei bella come un Angelo?”

— Giacomo Leopardi

11. “The end of pain we take as happiness.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

12. “I may be wrong, but it seems rare in our age to find a widely praised person whose own mouth is not the source of that praise.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

13. “Death is not evil, for it frees man from all ills and takes away his desires along with desire’s rewards.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

14. “Fate gave birth at one and the same time to two siblings, Love and Death.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

15. “No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

16. “All is mystery except our pain.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

17. “There’s no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

18. “Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

19. “The artisan or scientist or the follower of whatever discipline who has the habit of comparing himself not with other followers but with the discipline itself will have a lower opinion of himself, the more excellent he is.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

20. “It’s not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

21. “If content with himself and mankind, a man is never harsh or curt.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

22. “The commonplace expression that life is nothing but a play is verified above all in this: the world speaks absolutely consistently in one way and acts absolutely consistently in another.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

23. “Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

24. “Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

25. “The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

26. “The old man, especially if he is in society in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

27. “No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

28. “He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world. This is because it is practical experience of life, and certainly not philosophy, that makes people hate their fellows.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

29. “People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

30. “You can be happy indeed if you have breathing space from pain.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

31. “He who doubts, knows – knows as much as can be known.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

32. “Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

33. “There are some centuries which – apart from everything else – in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

34. “Being asked for what purpose he thought men were bom, he laughingly replied “ To realise how much better it were not to be born.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

35. “We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

36. “Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

37. “Men are wretched by necessity, and determined to believe themselves wretched by accident.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

38. “Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

39. “What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go contemplating wastelands; then you set.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

40. “Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

41. “My thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet to me in this sea.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

42. “Man is doomed either squander his youth, which is the only time he has to store provisions for the coming years and provide for his own well-being, or to spend his youth procuring pleasures in advance for that time of life when he will be too old to enjoy them.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

43. “So the peak of human knowledge or philosophy is to recognize its own uselessness – if man were still the same as he was in the beginning – and to undo the damage that it has done, and return man to the condition in which he would always have been if it had never existed.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

44. “A dictionary can embrace only a small part of the vast tapestry of a language.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

45. “The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

46. “Irresolute men are sometimes very persistent in their undertakings, because if they give up their designs they would have to make a second resolution.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

47. “In the old days, books had awful covers and marvelous content; nowadays, the opposite happens.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

48. “To that creature, being born, Its birthday is a day to mourn.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

49. “The artist’s conception of his art or the scientist’s of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.”

— Giacomo Leopardi

50. “If the best company is that which we leave feeling most satisfied with ourselves, it follows that it is the company we leave most bored.”

— Giacomo Leopardi