There are two kinds of incredulity, one that derives from science, and the other (far more common) from ignorance, and from not knowing how to see what is can be, from knowing only a few possibilities, etc., only a few truths and hence only a few probabilities, etc., from not knowing how far possibility extends. (612)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
There is no more effective means of gaining access to the origins of nations (together with the progress of the human mind and the history of the peoples, matters all faithfully represented in languages), their remotest epochs, their provenance, the spread of mankind, and its distribution throughout the world, in short, the history of the obscurest beginnings of society and its first steps, than through etymologies, which, by going back up from language to language until the first origins of a word, offer the clearest ideas we can hope to have regarding the term’s first relations, thoughts, notions, etc. (607)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
The analysis of things spells the death of their beauty or greatness and the death of poetry. So too with the analysis of ideas, resolving them into their parts and elements and presenting these parts or elements in isolation, bare, without any accompaniment of concomitant ideas. (589)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Certain quite extraordinary intelligences that nature has from time to time produced as if by some miracle have been either entirely or very nearly useless, precisely on account of the excessive power of either their intellect or their imagination which ended up unable to issue in anything or produce any specific result. (562)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Use of money is one of the principle obstacles to the preservation of equality among men and hence of free states, to the preponderance of true merit and of virtue, etc., etc. And its use is one of the principal reasons that introduce and gradually force society into oppression, despotism, servitude, the burden placed by single classes on others, in short, that extinguish the moral and inner life of the nations, and the nations themselves as nations. (561)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
The best use and effect of reason and reflection is to destroy or diminish reason and reflection, and their use and effects, in man. (556)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Once reason is introduced into the world everything little by little, and the more it progresses, becomes ugly, petty, dead, monotonous. (488)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Man is so fond of praise that, even in relation to things that he thinks are worthless and where he has neither sought nor striven to be praiseworthy, the fact of being praised still gratifies him. Indeed, it will often induce him to try and raise in his own reckoning the worth and reputation of that trifle for which he has been praised, and to persuade himself that it, or the fact of being praiseworthy in relation to it, is by no means trifling in the opinion of others. (361)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Each day we lose something; that is, some illusions, which are all we have, perish or wane. Experience or truth daily deprive us of some portion of our possessions. We do not live except by losing. Man is born rich in everything, and as he grows he gets poorer, until in old age he finds himself with almost nothing. (329)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Not even self-love is infinite; it is merely indefinite.
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.