Italo Svevo Quotes

#1. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish.

Italo Svevo

#2. 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

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

Italo Svevo

#4. 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

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

Italo Svevo

#6. 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

#7. Whenever I look at a mountain I always expect it to turn into a volcano.

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

Italo Svevo

#9. 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?

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#10. Sorrow and love
life, in other words
cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt.

Italo Svevo

#11. Complete freedom consists of being able to do what you like, provided you also do something you like less.

Italo Svevo

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

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#13. The fancies of wine are authentic events.

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#14. 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

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#15. 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.

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#16. Misunderstanding women is a clear sign of scant virility.

Italo Svevo

#17. In psychoanalysis there is never repetition, neither of the same images nor

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#18. It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.

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#19. To kill someone, even treacherously is more manly than to wound a friend by betraying his confidence.

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#20. 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

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

Italo Svevo

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

Italo Svevo

#23. 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.

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#24. The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

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#25. You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.

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

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#27. I wanted again May roses in December. I

Italo Svevo