Svevo Italo 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

We were fighting about nothing important while dreaming of the same things. — Boy George

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

It's nice when you're nervous and everybody's like, "Yeah, you should be nervous." Because a lot of times you're anxious and people say, "Relax. Shut up." And that just feels like, Well, I guess I'm also crazy. — John Mulaney

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

All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both. — Hector Hugh Munro

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

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

A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

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

So much must I live for others, that almost I am a stranger to myself. — Pope Innocent III

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

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

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

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

Life has confirmed for me the thoughts and impressions I had when I was 18, as if it was all intuition. — Francoise Sagan

Virtue is the music of the soul, the harmony of the passions. — Mary Collyer

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 real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it. — Jules De Goncourt

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

Because only the truest things always are true because they can't be true — E. E. Cummings

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