S'amor non è, che dunque è quel ch'io sento?
Ma s'egli è amor, perdio, che cosa et quale?
Se bona, onde l'effecto aspro mortale?
Se ria, onde sí dolce ogni tormento?
Canzone 132, st. 1
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life
“Wherefore not without cause has one of your own followers asked, "If God is, whence come evil things? If He is not, whence come good?"”
Unde haud iniuria tuorum quidam familiarium quaesiuit: `si quidem deus', inquit, `est, unde mala? Bona uero unde, si non est?
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century
Prose IV, line 30; translation by W.V. Cooper
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book I
“I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.”
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Gaio Valerio Catullo list of poems by Catullus
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
LXXXV, lines 1–2
Carmina
Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719) French theologian
44th Proposition, as translated by Mary Ilford in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), pp. 118-119
“What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.”
Alcuin (735–804) English scholar and abbot
in R Lacey and D Danziger, The Year 1000, Little, Brown and Co,GB, 1999, p. 57
Jackie DeShannon (1941) American singer-songwriter
"What the World Needs Now is Love" (1965); this song was actually written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and offered to other singers who initially passed it up. It became DeShannon's first number one hit.
Misattributed
