Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Luigi Pirandello

Italian Playwright, Dramatist and Novelist, Professor of Aesthetics and Stylistics, Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

"When [man] is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right."

"The mirror usually reflects only the way others see us, the way we are expected to behave, forced to behave - hardly ever what we really are."

"We believe that humanness consists in what we call conscience, in that courage, if you wish, which we have shown on one single occasion rather than in the cowardice which on many occasions has counseled prudence."

"The secret of living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand."

"You too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow."

"A fact is like a sack - it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place."

"Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart."

"Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life."

"Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me."

"The history of mankind is the history of ideas."

"We think we understand each other, but we never really do."

"No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering."

"Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them."

"A character, sir, you can always ask a man who he is. Because a character has a really his life, marked his character, so it is always someone. While a man - I will not say her now - a man so usually, it cannot be 'no'."

"A reality there was no date and no, we have to do it: it will never be one for all and forever but continuously and infinitely mutable."

"And love looked at the time and laughed, because he knew he did not need it. He pretended to die one day, and to flourish in the evening, without laws to be respected. He fell asleep in a corner of my heart for a time that did not exist. He fled without leave, returned without being party, the time he died and he was left."

"And was the most serious cases. I do not see what the dead. But I see that I had never lived. I see that the template which emptied my life, but others gave her, and I'm not in which Sgtha, I feel that the life of this template, were not my real life. It took me like any substance, they took a brain and spirit and the muscles and nerves and meat, and Ajnoha as they want to complete the work, and the acts, and obey the duties that looking for myself where not find it. And scream and scream my soul in this body of dead that were not bodies never. But how, in my boredom and hatred and horror of this man who did not? I live a different life from that fact that you dreamed of. I live my life in a template I feel he's dead and he lives for others. For those who raised him and who want to have this image."

"Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time."

"An hour short of pain c'impressiona long, a day passes and leaves no trace."

"As soon as one is born, one starts dying."

"Buffoons, buffoons! One can play any tune on them!"

"Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy."

"But we have to blame, me and you, if the words, per se, are empty? ... And you the fill of your way, in dirmele, and I nell'accoglierle, inevitably, I fill my sense. We have believed for instance, we have not understood at all."

"But only in order to know if you, as you really are now, see yourself as you once were with all the illusions that were yours then, with all the things both inside and outside of you as they seemed to you - as they were then indeed for you. Well, sir, if you think of all those illusions that mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don't even seem to you to exist any more, while once they were for you, don't you feel that - I won't say these boards - but the very earth under your feet is sinking away from you when you reflect that in the same way this you as you feel it today - all this present reality of yours - is fated to seem a mere illusion to you tomorrow?"

"For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers ; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right."

"From the peaks of its cloudy abstractions Mr. Anselmo left precipitar so often, such as avalanches, his thoughts. The reason, the link, the opportunities they remained there, in the clouds; so that those who listened to him could hardly to understand something."

"Here is a piece of earth. If you stand staring at it and doing nothing, what does the earth yield? Nothing. Just like a woman."

"For those who fall into sin, sir, responsible for all the sins that follow, it is not always those who, first, the fall?"

"I am an unrealized character, dramatically speaking."

"I am the son of Chaos, and not allegorically but really, because I was born in our country, which is found in a wood called, in dialect C…vusu by the inhabitants of Girgenti, dialect corruption of the true and ancient word Greek Kaos."

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory ? a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth."

"I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true."

"I could not see myself living"

"I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you."

"If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing."

"In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream."

"If the death, my lord, it was like one of quegl'insetti strange, disgusting, someone unexpectedly discovers us on ... She passes by, another passer-by, suddenly, it stops and cautious, with two outstretched fingers, he says: Excuse me, can? you, sir, there was death on him. And with those two outstretched fingers, seize him and throw him away ... It would be magnificent! But death is not like one of these nasty insects. Many casual strolling and aliens, maybe they have it on him, and no one sees it, and they think what they will do in the meantime peaceful tomorrow or after tomorrow another."

"In his madness he became a terrifying actor!"

"It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!"

"It is so. When YOU think so"

"Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory."

"Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true"

"Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes."

"Loneliness is never with you always without you, and only possible with a stranger around: a place or person who is, who completely ignore you, that ye ignorant, so that your will and your feeling remain suspended and lost in anguish and uncertainty, ceasing every statement you, cease the intimacy of your own consciousness. The real loneliness is a place that lives for themselves and for you that has no trace of either item, and where therefore the stranger you are"

"Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out."

"Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels."

"Personally, I don't give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind."

"None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct."

"My opinion is a view I hold until, well, until I find something that changes it."

"One Gives way to the temptation, only to rise from it again, afterwards, with a great eagerness to reestablish one's dignity, as if it were a tombstone to place on the grave of one's shame, and a monument to hide and sign the memory of our weaknesses. Everybody's in the same homes. Some folks have not the courage to say certain things, that's all! THE STEP-DAUGHTER: All Appear to have the courage to do them though."