“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
“A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.”
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
“Books have led some to learning and others to madness.”
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
“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."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
“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 (1304-1374)
“No one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all, aggressively perverse.”
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
“Learning is my sole delight.”
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"You keep to your own ways and leave mine to me."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"Man has not a greater enemy than himself."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"Events appear sad, pleasant, or painful, not because they are so in reality, but because we believe them to be so and the light in which we look at them depends upon our own judgment."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"Continued work and application form my soul's nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
The aged love what is practical while impetuous youth longs only for what is dazzling.
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
"The time will come when every change shall cease,
This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;
Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now shall ever last."
― Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)