Petrarch Quotes

• Love is the crowning grace of humanity.

  Petrarch

  Love Is, Grace, Humanity

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• Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

  Petrarch

  Love, Life, Heart

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• Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

  Petrarch

  Book, Heart, Friendly

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• A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.

  Petrarch

  Inspirational, Cutting, Desire

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• Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

  Petrarch

  Book, Jewels, Purple

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• For though I am a body of this earth, my firm desire is born from the stars.

  Petrarch

  Stars, Desire, Body

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• Man has not a greater enemy than himself.

  Petrarch

  Men, Enemy, Greater

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• And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

  Petrarch

  Stars, Ocean, Men

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• Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

  Petrarch

  Forgiveness, Peace, Anger

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• All pleasure in the world is a passing dream.

  Petrarch

  Dream, World, Pleasure

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• It is better to will the good than to know the truth,

  Petrarch

  Knows

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• Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

  Petrarch

  Writing, Hands, Mind

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• Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

  Petrarch

  Beauty, Beautiful, House

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• Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.

  Petrarch

  Friendship, Cancer, Cancer Survivor

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• I looked back at the summit of the mountain, which seemed but a cubit high in comparison with the height of human contemplation, were in not too often merged in the corruptions of the earth.

  Petrarch

  Climbing, Mountain, Earth

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• Virtue is health, vice is sickness.

  Petrarch

  Vices, Sickness, Virtue

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• Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

  Petrarch

  Dream, Sleep, May

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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.

  Petrarch

  Recovery, Doctors, People

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• I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.

  Petrarch

  Born, Has Beens

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• Man has no greater enemy than himself. I have acted contrary to my sentiments and inclination; throughout our whole lives we do what we never intended, and what we proposed to do, we leave undone.

  Petrarch

  Men, Enemy, Undone

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• Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure.

  Petrarch

  Curiosity, Departure, World

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• Continued work and application form my soul's nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live.

  Petrarch

  Soul, Relax, Form

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• Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

  Petrarch

  Book, Madness

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• Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief

  Petrarch

  Grief, Argument

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• Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence; and with this thought, my soul begins to breathe.

  Petrarch

  Soul, Breathe, Absence

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