Explore Quotes by Petrarch

How fortune brings to earth the over-sure!

Do you suppose there is any living man so unreasonable that if he found himself stricken with a dangerous ailment he would not anxiously desire to regain the blessing of health?

What name to call thee by, O virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenances

Who naught suspects is easily deceived.

And tears are heard within the harp I touch.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

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.

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

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.

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.

A good death does honour to a whole life.

I saw the tracks of angels in the earth: the beauty of heaven walking by itself on the world.

Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.

Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,_x000D__x000D_Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,_x000D__x000D_In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd,_x000D__x000D_Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;_x000D__x000D_And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last_x000D__x000D_The speed that spins the future and the past:_x000D__x000D_And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,_x000D__x000D_Awful eternity shall reign alone.

The time will come when every change shall cease,_x000D__x000D_This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:_x000D__x000D_No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;_x000D__x000D_Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,_x000D__x000D_But an eternal now shall ever last.