Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
There is no need to tell you that the 'Prince of Salina' is the Prince Lampedusa, my great-grandfather Giulio Fabrizio.
If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.Collection: Change
Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.Collection: Love
All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.Collection: Thinking
Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.Collection: Short Life
To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.Collection: Rage
A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.Collection: House
As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?Collection: Mean