Francesco Petrarca Quotes & Sayings

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying. — Francesco Petrarca

A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires. — Francesco Petrarca

Blessed be the eyes that saw her while she lived!" 310 — Francesco Petrarca

I have to thank you ... because you have so often helped me forget the evils of today. — Francesco Petrarca

If I believed I could free myself, by dying,
from amorous thoughts that bind me to the earth,
I would already have laid these troubled limbs
and their burden in the earth myself: — Francesco Petrarca

[He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137
(from Montaigne, On sadness) — Francesco Petrarca

How do you know, poor fool? Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence'; and with this thought, my soul begins to breathe. — Francesco Petrarca

Neither exhortations to virtue nor the argument of approaching death should divert us from literature; for in a good mind it excites the love of virtue, and dissipates, or at least diminishes, the fear of death. — Francesco Petrarca

No one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all , aggressively perverse. — Francesco Petrarca

Shame is the fruit of my vanities, and remorse, and the clearest knowledge of how the world's delight is a brief dream. — Francesco Petrarca

Love discovered me all weaponless,
and opened the way to the heart through the eyes,
which are made the passageways and doors of tears:
so that it seems to me it does him little honour
to wound me with his arrow, in that state,
he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed — Francesco Petrarca

Yet have I oft been beaten in the field, And sometimes hurt," said I, "but scorn'd to yield." He smiled and said: "Alas! thou dost not see, My son, how great a flame's prepared for thee. — Francesco Petrarca

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command. — Francesco Petrarca

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy. — Francesco Petrarca

walk forwards in the radiance of the past — Francesco Petrarca

The world's delight is a brief dream. — Francesco Petrarca

It did not seem to me to be a time to guard myself
against Love's blows: so I went on
confident, unsuspecting; from that, my troubles
started, amongst the public sorrows — Francesco Petrarca

I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself. — Francesco Petrarca

I wish to go beyond the fire that burns me. — Francesco Petrarca

The senses reign, and reason now is dead;
from one pleasing desire comes another.
Virtue, honor, beauty, gracious bearing,
sweet words have caught me in her lovely branches
in which my heart is tenderly entangled.
In thirteen twenty-seven, and precisely
at the first hour of the sixth of April
I entered the labyrinth, and I see no way out. — Francesco Petrarca

Loving friendship is able to endure everything; it refuses no burden. — Francesco Petrarca

I cannot have a sufficiency of books. Indeed, I have more than I should... Books give utter delight: they talk with us... and are bound to us by lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates a longing for another. — Francesco Petrarca

Everything else, every thought, goes fore and forever fades away into the recesses of time, and therein what remains is my soul's love for you. — Francesco Petrarca

Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality. — Francesco Petrarca

Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. (Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness.) — Francesco Petrarca

How much I envy you, you greedy earth, who get to clasp the one who's taken from me, and keep me from the air of her sweet face in which I once found peace from all my war! How — Francesco Petrarca

I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow. (Quoted by Josh Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything) — Francesco Petrarca

Sweet is the death that taketh end by love. — Francesco Petrarca

Never would I trade for some new shape
that laurel I was first, in whose sweet shade
all other pleasures vanish in my heart. — Francesco Petrarca

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make? — Francesco Petrarca

She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying
her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.
It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;
for death looked lovely in her face. — Francesco Petrarca

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not. — Francesco Petrarca

I am possessed by one insatiable passion , which I cannot restrain nor would I if I could ... I cannot get enough books . — Francesco Petrarca

Go mortals, sweat, pant, toil, range the lands and seas to pile up riches you cannot keep; glory that will not last. The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this. — Francesco Petrarca

Vede insieme l'uno e l'altro polo,
Le stelle vaghe e lor viaggio torto;
E vedi, 'I veder nostro quanto e corto.
(You see both poles at once, the travelling stars in their winding courses, and you see just how limited our seeing really is.) — Francesco Petrarca

Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate ... — Francesco Petrarca

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us. — Francesco Petrarca

To be able to say how much love, is love but little. — Francesco Petrarca

Learning is my sole delight. — Francesco Petrarca

Now, what I am, and what I was, I know; I see the seasons in procession go With still increasing speed; while things to come, Unknown, unthought, amid the growing gloom Of long futurity, perplex my soul, While life is posting to its final goal. Mine is the crime, who ought with clearer light To watch the winged years' incessant flight; And not to slumber on in dull delay — Francesco Petrarca

I stop, then, in my tracks, to recollect the awesome presence that I've left behind, the road ahead so long, my life so short, and bow my head and burst out into tears. While — Francesco Petrarca

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together. — Francesco Petrarca

Books have led some to learning and others to madness. — Francesco Petrarca

To have displeased evil and ignorant men is the sure sign of genius and virtue... — Francesco Petrarca

And what is the use of knowing many things if, when you have learned the dimensions of heaven and earth, the measure of the seas, the courses of stars, the virtues of plants and stones, the secrets of nature, you still don't know yourself? — Francesco Petrarca