Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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