Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Quotes

• If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Change, Want, Ifs

  10 Copy quote

• Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Love, Flames, Years

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1960). “The Leopard”, Pantheon Books

  46 Copy quote

• If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Change, Book, Want

  The Leopard ch. 1 (1957) (translation by Archibald Colquhoun)

  27 Copy quote

• 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.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Thinking, Sheep, Two

  Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (2010). “The Leopard: Revised and with new material”, p.143, Random House

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Short Life, Passion, Self

  9 Copy quote

• To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Rage, Mock, Gentlemanly

  6 Copy quote

• A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  House, Rooms, Worth Living

  "The Leopard" translated by Archibald Colquhoun, London: Fontana, (p. 128), 1963.

  6 Copy quote

• 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?

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Mean, Done, World

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1960). “The Leopard”, Pantheon Books

  6 Copy quote

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