Top 70 Luigi Pirandello Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!”

— Luigi Pirandello

2. “We think we understand each other, but we never really do.”

— Luigi Pirandello

3. “You should show some respect for what other people see and feel, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see and feel.”

— Luigi Pirandello

4. “Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.”

— Luigi Pirandello

5. “Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.”

— Luigi Pirandello

6. “If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.”

— Luigi Pirandello

7. “Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me.”

— Luigi Pirandello

8. “Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”

— Luigi Pirandello

9. “The secret of living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.”

— Luigi Pirandello

10. “Refusing to have an opinion is a way of having one, isn’t it?”

— Luigi Pirandello

11. “It is much easier to be a hero than a gentleman.”

— Luigi Pirandello

12. “We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can’t make it think.”

— Luigi Pirandello

13. “A fact is like a sack which won’t stand up if it’s empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which caused it to exist.”

— Luigi Pirandello

14. “Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.”

— Luigi Pirandello

15. “I am an “unrealized” character, dramatically speaking...”

— Luigi Pirandello

16. “I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.”

— Luigi Pirandello

17. “Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be – like the reality of yesterday – an illusion tomorrow.”

— Luigi Pirandello

18. “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

— Luigi Pirandello

19. “In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.”

— Luigi Pirandello

20. “If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.”

— Luigi Pirandello

21. “As soon as one is born, one starts dying.”

— Luigi Pirandello

22. “Pretending is a virtue. If you cant pretend, you can’t be king.”

— Luigi Pirandello

23. “We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It’s no matter that this dye doesn’t fool you. My lady, you don’t dye your hair to decieve other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little.”

— Luigi Pirandello

24. “Here is a piece of earth. If you stand staring at it and doing nothing, what does the earth yield? Nothing. Just like a woman.”

— Luigi Pirandello

25. “Have you ever thought to go away and never come back? Run away and lose your tracks, to go to a place far away and start living again, living a new life, only yours, really live? Did you ever think?”

— Luigi Pirandello

26. “A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his special characteristics; for which reason he is always “somebody.” But a man – I’m not speaking of you now – may very well be ‘nobody’.”

— Luigi Pirandello

27. “Nowhere! It is merely to show you that one is born to life in many forms, in many shapes, as tree, or as stone, as water, as butterfly, or as woman. So one may also be born a character in a play.”

— Luigi Pirandello

28. “Woe to him who doesn’t know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!”

— Luigi Pirandello

29. “There is someone who is living my life. And I know nothing about him.”

— Luigi Pirandello

30. “We’re like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.”

— Luigi Pirandello

31. “Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.”

— Luigi Pirandello

32. “Blind yourself, for I am blind.”

— Luigi Pirandello

33. “The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.”

— Luigi Pirandello

34. “Women are like dreams, they are never the way you would like to have them.”

— Luigi Pirandello

35. “You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.”

— Luigi Pirandello

36. “Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won’t work out.”

— Luigi Pirandello

37. “Nati vivi, volevano vivere.”

— Luigi Pirandello

38. “I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.”

— Luigi Pirandello

39. “Do you recognize perhaps, also you, now, that a minute ago you were another?”

— Luigi Pirandello

40. “Fate, fortune, chance: all snares of life. You want to be, eh? There’s this catch: in abstract, you cannot just be. The being must be trapped in a form, and for some time it has to stay in it, here or there, this way or that. And everything, as long as it lasts, bears the penalty of its form, the penalty of being this way and no longer being able to be otherwise.”

— Luigi Pirandello

41. “Prima di guidicare la mia vita o il mio carattere, metti ti le mie scarpe, percorri il cammmino, che ho prcorso io. Vivi il mio dolore, i miei dubbi, le mie risate. Vivi gli anni che ho vissuto e caddi la dove ho caduto io e rialzati come ho fatto io.”

— Luigi Pirandello

42. “When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.”

— Luigi Pirandello

43. “Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.”

— Luigi Pirandello

44. “Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.”

— Luigi Pirandello

45. “The facts are to blame, my friend. We are all imprisoned by facts: I was born, I exist.”

— Luigi Pirandello

46. “It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!”

— Luigi Pirandello

47. “Not one of us can lie or pretend. We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.”

— Luigi Pirandello

48. “Man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them.”

— Luigi Pirandello

49. “Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don’t somehow con- struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don’t construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don’t construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.”

— Luigi Pirandello

50. “Personally, I don’t give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.”

— Luigi Pirandello