Petrarch Quotes
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Mere elegance of language can produce at best but an empty renown.
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He loves but lightly who his love can tell.
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Virtue is health, vice is sickness.
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If a hundred or a thousand people, all of the same age, of the same constitution and habits, were suddenly seized by the same illness, and one half of them were to place themselves under the care of doctors, such as they are in our time, whilst the other half entrusted themselves to Nature and to their own discretion, I have not the slightest doubt that there would be more cases of death amongst the former, and more cases of recovery among the latter.
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Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence; and with this thought, my soul begins to breathe.
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For style beyond the genius never dares.
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While life is in your body, you have the rein of all thoughts in your hands.
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A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.
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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?
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It is better to will the good than to know the truth.
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I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.
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I know and love the good, yet, ah! the worst pursue.
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Wanting is not enough, long and you attain it.
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Life in itself is short enough, but the physicians with their art, know to their amusement, how to make it still shorter.
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I desire that death find me ready and writing, or if it please Christ, praying and intears.
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Books have led some to learning and others to madness.
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For death betimes is comfort, not dismay, and who can rightly die needs no delay.
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Hitherto your eyes have been darkened and you have looked too much, yes, far too much, upon the things of earth. If these so much delight you what shall be your rapture when you lift your gaze to things eternal!
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How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.
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From thought to thought, from mountain peak to mountain. Love leads me on; for I can never still My trouble on the world's well beaten ways.
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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.
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To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.
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Man has not a greater enemy than himself.
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The end of doubt is the beginning of repose.