Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about Italy and Italians, the European country that has most influenced culture and culinary arts in the western world, rich in art and at the top of fashion and excellence in many fields.
Quotes about Italy
- Italy? A paradise inhabited by devils. (Henry Wotton)
- The Italians lose wars as if they were football matches and football matches as if they were wars. (Winston Churchill)
- The Italians govern themselves. (Alberto Sordi)
- If it wasn't the strength of natural selection that designed the fish, it must have been an Italian. (Douglas Adams)
- If you want to travel in joy, as I like it, find good Italians as travel companions. (Ernest Hemingway)
- You can waste precious hours contemplating such futility, and the traveler who has come to Italy to study Giotto's tactile values, or the corruption of the papacy, can happen to go back to his country without remembering anything except the blue sky and the men and the women who live under it. (Edward Morgan Forster)
- Comment to the Italian people: capable of shedding hot tears for a sentimental warbling and at the same instant of laughing rudely for a small setback on the scene. (Hermann Hesse)
- I lost my virginity at 18. It was time. I had chosen an Italian Catholic boy. I was forced to beg him. (Sharon Stone)
- Italians are a sedentary people: those who make a career get an armchair. (Gino Bartali)
- Italy is still as I left it, still dust on the roads, still scams from foreigners, present themselves as they wish. German honesty wherever you seek in vain, there is life and animation here, but not order and discipline; each thinks for himself, is in vain, warns the other, and the heads of state, they too, think only for themselves. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
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- I suspect, indeed I believe that Italians are the most fascinating men in the world. The most capable of seducing a woman, because they understand in any case, always, that the woman likes to be seduced with words as well as with physical contact. And these words have been known to Italian men for centuries, since trobadour times. They know how to speak, speak, speak. (Erica Jong)
- Italy, a country where everyone, by birthright, has shoes made as God commands. (Nicolai Lilin)
- Men towards life are like husbands in Italy towards wives: in need of believing them faithful although they know the opposite. So whoever has to live in a country needs to believe it beautiful and good; so men believe life a beautiful thing. Ridiculous in my eyes, like a beaked husband, and tender of his wife. (Giacomo Leopardi)
Now, petty-bourgeois Italians feel calm in the face of any form of scandal, if this scandal has any form of public opinion or power behind it; because they immediately recognize, in this scandal, a possibility of institutionalization, and, with this possibility, they fraternize. (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Aphorisms about Italy
- The Italian genius used by far the freest and finest way what he borrowed and put in it much more than what he got from it, being the richest genius, who could give more. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- Many Italians lead a double life: they do nothing for two. (Robert Emil Lembke)
- He had noticed that when two Italians are at the same table, they had a great desire to leave him so as not to hear the other one anymore. (Italo Svevo)
- Italy had spoiled many people. It made lazy, amateurish, second-rate; it did not discipline character, it did not nourish the characteristics of the fortunate sociable type and also "tough face" that flourished in Paris and London. (Henry James)
- England is a paradise for women, and a hell for horses: Italy is a paradise for horses, and a hell for women. (Robert Burton)
- The Italian male cannot stand alone; first the mother, who passes it on to his wife, and when both of them die, perhaps ends up in hospitalization. There is a nun, and they are pains, but she too is a saint because there are fewer and fewer people willing to wash the ass of the sick. (Lina Wertmuller)
- Italians don't have costumes; they only have customs. (Giacomo Leopardi)
- Italian men really appreciate beautiful women. They are not afraid of beauty. (Eva Herzigova)
- Italy is a poor country full of rich people. (Richard Newton Gardner)
- I often felt enveloped by the scent of oranges and lemons that breathed from those mountains, caressing and full of enticements, like an invitation to go to Italy. Indeed, once, in the golden light of twilight, I saw him in person, on the top of a mountain, the young god of spring, with the glorious head crowned with flowers and laurel, laughing eyes: and his flowery mouth cried: «I love you, come to me, in Italy. (Heinrich Heine)
- In Italy there are more people who are hearing impaired than previously thought; especially when it is duty to call. (Markus M. Ronner)
- The Italians complain too much, so they are doing well. (Wilhelm Muhs)
- Italy in terms of philosophical science and mature and profound knowledge of man and the world is incomparably inferior to France, England, Germany considering these and that generally. However, it is also very certain, although it will seem a paradox, that if the said nations are more philosophers than the Italians in the intellect, the Italians in practice are a thousand times more philosophers than the greatest philosopher found in any of the said nations. (Giacomo Leopardi)
- Italy has over fifty million actors. The worst are on stage. (Orson Welles)
Phrases about Italy
- Bizarre people the Italians. One day 45 million fascists. The next day 45 million between anti-fascists and partisans. Yet these 90 million Italians do not appear from the censuses. (Winston Churchill)
- You say that Hailè Selassiè was a dictator ... so I ask you: is it true that Italians eat only pizza and they are all mafia? Because that's what the newspapers write. Don't believe everything the newspapers write. (Bob Marley)
- Italy is the only country where the joy of living is still enjoyed. It makes us believe in the joy of living, even when it does not believe in it. (Roger Peyrefitte)
- Strange these Italians: they are so fussy that in every problem they look for the hair in the egg. And when they found it, they throw the egg and eat the fur. (Benedetto Croce)
- To govern the Italians is not impossible, it is useless. (Benito Mussolini)
- Being innocent in Italy is dangerous! There is no alibi. (Boris Makaresko)
- I believe in the Italian people. They are a generous, hardworking people, they do not ask for work, a home and to be able to take care of the health of their loved ones. Therefore he does not ask for heaven on earth. He asks what every people should have. (Sandro Pertini)
- Italians have only two things on their mind: the other is spaghetti. (Catherine Deneuve)
- If the Italians possessed the Japanese work ethic, they could be the masters of the planet. Thank goodness they don't have it. (Bill Bryson)
- The Italians ... you can't find one that is honest. (Richard Nixon)
- I want Italians to play rugby as they drive: fearless, aggressive and absolutely unpredictable. (John Kirwan)
- From the Italians I learned something but it is difficult to say what. Because you can only learn from them after throwing away every idea we made before. It is not the beauties, nor the orange trees, not even the splendid architecture, but the way of life. Here I learned to live. (Ingeborg Bachmann)
- Italy is a country that must learn to love itself, must regain a sense of nation. (Sergio Marchionne)
