Luigi Pirandello > Quotes

“Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers ; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyse it, just as if happiness were his right.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“The capacity for deluding ourselves that today's reality is the only true one, on the one hand, sustains us, but on the other, it plunges us into an endless void, because today's reality is destined to prove delusion for us tomorrow; and life doesn't conclude. It can't conclude. Tomorrow if it concludes, it's finished.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true! We find this out for ourselves very clearly when by some terrible chance we're suddenly stopped in the middle of doing something and we're left dangling there, suspended. We realize then, that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“Le anime hanno un loro particolar modo d'intendersi, d'entrare in intimità, fino a darsi del tu, mentre le nostre persone sono tuttavia impacciate nel commercio delle parole comuni, nella schiavitù delle esigenze sociali. Han bisogni lor proprii e le loro proprie aspirazioni le anime, di cui il corpo non si dà per inteso, quando veda l'impossibilità di soddisfarli e di tradurle in atto. E ogni qualvolta due che comunichino fra loro così, con le anime soltanto, si trovano soli in qualche luogo, provano un turbamento angoscioso e quasi una repulsione violenta d'ogni minimo contatto materiale, una sofferenza che li allontana, e che cessa subito, non appena un terzo intervenga. Allora, passata l'angoscia, le due anime sollevate si ricercano e tornano a sorridersi da lontano.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal

“E l’amore guardò il tempo e rise, perché sapeva di non averne bisogno. Finse di morire per un giorno, e di rifiorire alla sera, senza leggi da rispettare. Si addormentò in un angolo di cuore per un tempo che non esisteva. Fuggì senza allontanarsi, ritornò senza essere partito, il tempo moriva e lui restava.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“It is so.When YOU think so”
― Luigi Pirandello

“The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a "mine," that is to say, that was not for me!)—a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate—this idea gave me no rest.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“The unfortunate part is that you, my dear friend, will never know, and I shall never be able to tell you, how what you say to me is translated inside me. You did not speak Turkish, no. We both employed, you and I, the same language, the same words. But is it our fault, yours and mine, if words in themselves are empty? Empty, my dear friend. You fill them with your meaning, as you speak them to me; while I, in taking them in, inevitably fill them with my own. We thought we understood each other; we did not understand each other at all.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand

“Imparerai a tue spese che nel lungo tragitto della vita incontrerai tante maschere e pochi volti.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Uno, nessuno e centomila - Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore

“وقضيتي كانت أفدح. فأنا لا أرى ما مات فيّ. ولكني أرى أني لم أعش أبداً. أرى أن القالب الذي أفرغت فيه حياتي، إنما أعطاه لها الآخرون، ولست أنا الذي صغتها فيه، فأنا أشعر أن حياة هذا القالب، لم تكن حياتي الحقيقية. لقد أخذوني كأية مادة، أخذوا دماغاً وروحاً وعضلات وأعصاباً ولحماً، وعجنوها على النحو الذي يريدونه حتى تنجز أعمالاً، وتقوم بأفعال، وتطيع الواجبات التي أبحث عن نفسي فيها فلا أجدها.
وأصرخ، وتصرخ روحي في هذه الهيئة الميتة التي لم تكن هيئتي أبداً. ولكن كيف، وفي نفسي سأم وحقد ورعب من هذا الرجل الذي لم أكنه. من هذا القالب المميت الذي يقيدني فلا أقدر على التحرر. إنه قالب مثقل بالواجبات التي أشعر أنها ليست واجباتي. مرهق بأعمال لا تهمني، متخذ كرمز للتقدير الذي لا أعرف ما أصنع به. إن هذه الواجبات والأعمال والتقدير والإحترام صور خارجة عن حقيقة نفسي، إنها أشياء ميتة، لا معنى لها، إلا أن تثقل كاهلي، وترهقني وتسحقني، ولا تدع لي الفرصة للتنفس. أتحرر؟؟ ولكن متى استطاع إنسان إلغاء الحقيقة الواقعة فينكر الموت عندما يأخذ بخناقه .. والحقيقة أنه مهما كان مسلكك في الحياة فلا بد أن تقيدك المحن التي يجرها عليك. وتحيط بك تلك المسؤولية التي أخذتها على عاتقك كنها الجو الخانق الكثيف. فكيف أستطيع التحرر، وأنا سجين هذا القالب الغريب الذي يمثلني كما أنا بالنسبة للجميع، وكما يعرفني ويحترمني الجميع؟
إنني أعيش حياة مختلفة عن تلك الحقيقة التي أحلم بها. إنني أعيش حياتي في قالب أشعر أنه ميت وهو يعيش من أجل الآخرين. من أجل الذين رفعوه والذين يريدون له هذه الصورة .. فهو مرغم إذاً على أن يعمل من أجل زوجتي وأطفالي والمجتمع والسادة طلاب الحقوق في الجامعة والسادة العملاء الذين أودعوني الحياة والشرف والحرية والثروة. يعمل هكذا ولا أستطيع تغييره ولا أستطيع أن أركله بالأقدام وأزيحه وأتمرد عليه وأنتقم منه.”
― Luigi Pirandello, قصص ايطالية

“I am an "unrealized" character, dramatically speaking...”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“…my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“But only in order to know if you, as you really are now, see yourself as you once were with all the illusions that were yours then, with all the things both inside and outside of you as they seemed to you - as they were then indeed for you. Well, sir, if you think of all those illusions that mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don't even seem to you to exist any more, while once they were for you, don't you feel that - I won't say these boards - but the very earth under your feet is sinking away from you when you reflect that in the same way this you as you feel it today - all this present reality of yours - is fated to seem a mere illusion to you tomorrow?”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“Do you recognize perhaps, also you, now, that a minute ago you were another?”
― Luigi Pirandello, Uno, nessuno, e centomila

“And the air is new. And everything, instant by instant, is as it is, preparing to appear. [...] This is the only way I can live now. To be reborn moment by moment. [...] I die at every instant, and I am reborn, new and without memories: live and whole, no longer inside myself, but in every thing outside.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve to you.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“La solitudine non è mai con voi; è sempre senza di voi, e soltanto possibile con un estraneo attorno: luogo o persona che sia, che del tutto vi ignorino, che del tutto voi ignoriate, così che la vostra volontà e il vostro sentimento restino sospesi e smarriti in un’incertezza angosciosa e, cessando ogni affermazione di voi, cessi l’intimità stessa della vostra coscienza. La vera solitudine è in un luogo che vive per sé e che per voi non ha traccia né voce, e dove dunque l’estraneo siete voi”
― Luigi Pirandello

“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“You don’t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Enrico IV - Diana e la Tuda

“Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“And no one realizes we should all, always, look like that, each with his eyes full of horror at his own, inescapable solitude.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand