Luigi Pirandello
In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.Collection: Dreams
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.Collection: Relationship
The history of mankind is the history of ideas.Collection: History
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.Collection: Hope
Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Dreams
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
When you say you are in love with humanity, you are well satisfied with yourself.
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be - like the reality of yesterday - an illusion tomorrow.
You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
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.
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.
Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.
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!
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.
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.
There is someone who is living my life. And I know nothing about him.Collection: Living My Life
We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.Collection: Thinking
Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.Collection: Life
Pretending is a virtue. If you cant pretend, you can't be king.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: House
We think we understand each other, but we never really do.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Acceptance
All I'm saying is that you should show some respect for what other people see with their eyes and feel with their fingers, even though it be the exact opposite.Collection: Respect
It is so.When YOU think soCollection: Thinking
If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.Collection: Thinking
Those who understood, in fact, say: 'I mustn't do this, I mustn't do that,' so as not to commit some stupidity or other! Splendid! But at a certain point we realize that all life is stupidity; so tell me yourself what it means never to have done anything foolish. At the very least it means you have never lived.Collection: Mean
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.Collection: Wall
Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedesCollection: Sharks
My opinion is a view I hold until... well, until I find something that changes it.Collection: Views
It is the hardest thing to close the open hand of someone you love.Collection: Respect
Women are like dreams, they are never the way you would like to have them.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Men
Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don't somehow con- struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don't construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don't construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.Collection: Believe
If we have no other reality beyond the illusion, 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.Collection: Reality
When [man] is happy he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Art
Phantoms in general are nothing more than trifling disorders of the spirit; images we cannot contain within the bounds of sleep.Collection: Sleep
Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.Collection: Lying
Buffoons, buffoons! One can play any tune on them!Collection: Play
Woman - for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind."Collection: Women
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.Collection: Writing
Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you'll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!Collection: Interpretation
We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It’s no matter that this dye doesn’t fool you. My lady, you don’t dye your hair to decieve other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little.Collection: Mirrors
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.Collection: Yield
Six Characters in Search of an Author.Collection: Character
Blind yourself, for I am blind.Collection: Blind
Refusing to have an opinion is a way of having one, isn't it?Collection: Way
When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.Collection: Character