Luigi Pirandello

Because evil, my dear child, can be done to anyone and by everyone, but good can only be done to those who need it.

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.

Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you -- if you don't mind my saying so?

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.

You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.

...and here, in this if I always lose myself.

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which from time to time reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

You too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today since like that of yesterday it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.

I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.