Svevo Quotes & Sayings

Pain and love - the whole of life, in short - cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer. — Italo Svevo

Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them. — Italo Svevo

When will you discover that it would be a good idea to memorize your life, even the large part of it that will revolt you? — Italo Svevo

To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street. — Claudio Magris

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. — Italo Svevo

The sun didn't illuminate me! When you are old, you remain in shadow, even when you have wit. — Italo Svevo

Sorrow and love
life, in other words
cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt. — Italo Svevo

Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction. — Italo Svevo

There are three things I always forget. Names, faces and ... the third I can't remember. — Italo Svevo

Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance. — Italo Svevo

A preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness. — Italo Svevo

Misunderstanding women is a clear sign of scant virility. — Italo Svevo

Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness — Italo Svevo

To kill someone, even treacherously is more manly than to wound a friend by betraying his confidence. — Italo Svevo

Complete freedom consists of being able to do what you like, provided you also do something you like less. — Italo Svevo

My idea of a good herbalist isn't someone who knows the uses of forty different herbs, but someone who knows how to use one herb in forty different ways. — Svevo Brooks

Whenever I look at a mountain I always expect it to turn into a volcano. — Italo Svevo

I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes. — Nathaniel Rich

In psychoanalysis there is never repetition, neither of the same images nor — Italo Svevo

Health doesn't analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves. — Italo Svevo

I was really suffering from my resolutions much more than from my [vices]. I ought to try and cure myself without making any resolutions. According to him my personality in the course of years had become divided in two, one of which gave orders while the other was only a slave which, directly when the supervision was relaxed, disobeyed the master's orders out of sheer love of liberty. So what I ought to do was to give it absolute freedom and at the same time look my vice in the face as if it was something new and I were meeting it for the first time. I must not fight it, I must forget it, and treat it with complete indifference, turning my back on it as if it were not worthy to keep me company. — Italo Svevo

Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated. — Italo Svevo

Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish. — Italo Svevo

And it is true that life lacks the monotony of museums. There come days which seem worthy of being framed, but they are so full of conflicting sounds, of line and color and living, burning light that they never become tedious. — Italo Svevo

The fancies of wine are authentic events. — Italo Svevo

I wanted again May roses in December. I — Italo Svevo

True religion, indeed, is that which does not have to be avowed in order to provide the solace that at times ... if only rarely ... you cannot do without. — Italo Svevo

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno . — Italo Svevo

You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide. — Italo Svevo

It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent. — Italo Svevo

When my eyes closed, however, in the darkness I saw that her words had created a new world, like all words that are not true. I — Italo Svevo