Francesco Petrarca

The world’s delight is a brief dream.

To be able to say how much love, is love but little.

My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.

Blessed be the eyes that saw her while she lived!” 310

Shame is the fruit of my vanities, and remorse, and the clearest knowledge of how the world's delight is a brief dream.

Learning is my sole delight.

Vol schaamte dat ik niet genoeg liet horen
over uw schoonheid, vrouwe, denk ik weer
hoe zij mij zozeer trof, die eerste keer,
dat mij geen ander ooit nog zal bekoren.

Maar u te loven is mij niet beschoren:
te ontoereikend blijkt mijn ganzenveer.
Mijn hersens lijken, als ik het probeer,
verlamd te zijn en in ontzag bevroren.

Vaak ving ik aan te zingen, maar moest zwijgen
omdat mijn krachten mij begaven, want
welk stemgeluid kan tot uw hoogte stijgen?

Vaak wilde ik een lofdicht op u maken,
maar schroom heeft steeds mijn pen, mijn hoofd, mijn hand
gedwongen om die pogingen te staken.

(Ike Cialona)

«Mostrando vas la vía a otros, ¡oh, hermano!, y tú frecuentemente perdido andas, y más hoy todavía.»

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don’t know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make?

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

Sono posseduto da una passione inesauribile che finora non ho potuto né voluto frenare. Non riesco a saziarmi di libri.

My destiny leads me to seek and see her, drawn to the thing that I know will consume me.

I rejoiced in my progress, mourned my weaknesses, and commiserated the universal instability of human conduct. I had well-nigh forgotten where I was and our object in coming; but at last I dismissed my anxieties, which were better suited to other surroundings, and resolved to look about me and see what we had come to see. The sinking sun and the lengthening shadows of the mountain were already warning us that the time was near at hand when we must go. As if suddenly wakened from sleep, I turned about and gazed toward the west. I was unable to discern the summits of the Pyrenees, which form the barrier between France and Spain; not because of any intervening obstacle that I know of but owing simply to the insufficiency of our mortal vision

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

No one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all , aggressively perverse.