The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.

I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.