Giacomo Leopardi: Other

Giacomo Leopardi was Italian poet, philosopher and writer. Explore interesting quotes on other.
Giacomo Leopardi: 36 quotes4 likes

“It seems as though death were the essential aim of all things. That which has no existence cannot die; yet all that exists has proceeded from nothing. The final cause of existence is not happiness, for nothing is happy. It is true, living creatures seek this end in all their works, but none obtain it; and during all their life, ever deceiving, tormenting, and exerting themselves, they suffer indeed for no other purpose than to die.”

Giacomo Leopardi

Essays and Dialogues (1882), The Song of the Wild Cock

“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.”

Giacomo Leopardi book 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.”

Giacomo Leopardi book Zibaldone

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