Top 37 Francesco Petrarca Quotes
#1. Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. (Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness.)
Francesco Petrarca
#2. 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
#3. 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
#6. 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
#9. 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
#10. I am possessed by one insatiable passion , which I cannot restrain nor would I if I could ... I cannot get enough books .
Francesco Petrarca
#11. Loving friendship is able to endure everything; it refuses no burden.
Francesco Petrarca
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.
Francesco Petrarca
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. [He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137
(from Montaigne, On sadness)
Francesco Petrarca
#30. 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
#31. I have to thank you ... because you have so often helped me forget the evils of today.
Francesco Petrarca
#32. 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
#33. No one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all , aggressively perverse.
Francesco Petrarca
#35. 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
#36. To have displeased evil and ignorant men is the sure sign of genius and virtue...
Francesco Petrarca
#37. 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
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