Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

"Beauty is the promise of happiness."

"One cannot say that one fully understands one's own life until it is nearly finished."

"Everything concurs to deprive us of our assurance; we are crushed at every moment by the weight of the world."

"To understand the world, one must sometimes stand aside from the world."

"The Sicilian spirit is made of contradictions that resolve themselves in resignation."

"Time itself is nothing; it is always the same, whether we move or stand still."

"We believe ourselves to be moralists when we are merely the servants of history."

"Life is full of small courtesies, and these small courtesies compose its dignity."

"The old order changes, yielding place to new, and we ourselves must change or perish."

"We must accept ourselves as we are, for improvement comes through acceptance."

"The past cannot be changed; only our understanding of it can be transformed."

"Love is the only force that justifies the continuation of the human species."

"Art preserves what time would otherwise destroy."

"In the end, all we possess is memory and the manner in which we face our mortality."

"Sicily teaches us that beneath every surface lies an abyss of complexity."

"The search for truth is more important than the discovery of it."

"We are prisoners of our circumstances, yet within those constraints we are free."

"The educated man understands that ignorance is not shameful; refusal to learn is."

"Power corrupts not because it is evil, but because it isolates from reality."

"In every family there exists a secret history unknown to the world."

"Hope is the most dangerous of all illusions, yet we cannot live without it."

"The work of literature is to make us understand ourselves through others."

"A man's courage is measured not by his willingness to fight, but by his refusal to surrender to despair."

"We love not the people themselves, but the versions of them we create in our minds."

"Patience is the virtue of those who have learned that haste leads nowhere."

"The machinery of society grinds on, indifferent to individual suffering."

"Music is the language that speaks when words are insufficient."

"To be truly alive, one must embrace both pleasure and pain."

"The aristocracy of the spirit exists independent of social rank."

"We are all playing a role; the question is whether we know it."