- In the valley a bicycle is just as necessary as a pair of shoes, in fact more so. Because even if a man hasn't any shoes he can still ride a bicycle, whereas if he hasn't a bicycle he must surely travel on foot.
- Minutes and seconds are strictly city preoccupations. In the city people hurry, hurry so as not to waste a single minute, and fail to realize that they are throwing a lifetime away.
- I was born near the Po and it is the only respectable river in all Italy. To be respectable, a river must flow through a plain because water was created to stay horizontal and only when it is perfectly horizontal does it preserve its natural dignity. Niagara Falls is an embarrassing phenomenon, like a man who walks on his hands.
- When you share your last crust of bread with a beggar, you mustn't behave as if you were throwing a bone to a dog. You must give humbly, and thank him for allowing you to have a part in his hunger.
- It is right to hate sin, but not to hate the sinner.
- Once a hundred men were shut into an enormous dark room, each one of them with an unlit lamp. One of them managed to light his lamp, and so they all could see one another and get to know one another. As the rest lit their lamps, more and more of the objects around them came into view, until finally everything in the room stood out as good and beautiful. Now, follow me closely: there were a hundred lamps, but only one idea; yet it took the light of all the lamps to reveal the details of everything in the room. Every flame was the hundredth part of one great idea, one great light, the idea of the existence and eternal greatness of the Creator. It was as if a man had broken a statuette into a hundred pieces and given one piece to each of a hundred men. The hundred men groped for one another and tried to fit the fragments together, making thousands of misshapen figures until at last they joined them properly. I repeat, every man lit his own lamp and the light of the hundred lamps together was Truth and Revelation. This should have satisfied them. But each man thought that the beauty of the objects he saw around him was due to the light of his own lamp, which had brought them out of the darkness. Some men stopped to worship their own lamps, and others wandered off in various directions, until the great light was broken up into a hundred flames, each one of which could illuminate only a fraction of the truth. And so you see, the hundred lamps must come together again in order to find the true light. Today men wander mistrustfully about, each one in the light of his own lamp, with an area of melancholy darkness all around him, clinging to the slightest detail of whatever object he can illuminate by himself. And so I say that ideas do not exist; there is only one Idea, one Truth with a hundred facets. Ideas are neither finite nor finished, because there is only this one and eternal Idea. But men must join their fellows again like those in the enormous room.
- I know that seeing men who let God's grace perish is a mortal sin for you, because you know that I got off my horse to collect a crumb of bread. But we must forgive them, because they do not do it to offend God. They are frantically seeking justice on earth because they no longer have faith in divine justice, and are frantically seeking the goods of the earth because they have no faith in the divine reward. And therefore they believe only in what is touched and seen, and the flying machines are for them hell angels of this earthly hell that they try in vain to make it a Paradise. It is too much culture that leads to ignorance, because if culture is not supported by faith, at a certain point man sees only the mathematics of things. And the harmony of this mathematics becomes his God, and he forgets that it is God who created this mathematics and this harmony. But your God is not made of numbers, and the angels of good fly in the sky of your Paradise. Progress makes the world become smaller for men: one day, when the machines will run at one hundred miles per minute, the world will seem microscopic to men, and then man will find himself as a sparrow on the knob of a very high flagpole and it will face the infinite, and in the infinite it will find God and faith in real life. And he will hate the machines that have reduced the world to a handful of numbers and destroy them with his own hands. But it will still take some time.
- Suffering is an acid that poisons muscles and bones, but cleanses the soul and sees everything with other eyes
- To remain free, one must, at a good time, take the path of prison without hesitation.
- I never regretted doing tomorrow what I could have done yesterday or a month earlier. Often I am saddened by rereading the things I have done: but in the end I never bother overly because I can say, in full awareness, that I have always struggled not to do them. I have always tried to put them off until tomorrow.
- I've always disapproved of guys who act like "real men". I have always considered negative experiments those monstrous communities of boys who manage themselves, discuss serious problems and spoil their childhood with the sole result of having, at the age of fourteen, all the most important and foul defects of men of forty-five.
- The greatest misfortunes of humanity were originated by those who wanted to simplify life by planning the world.
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