35 Inspirational Italo Calvino Quotes On Success

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death. Italo Calvino is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia, in Tuscany. Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. May these Italo Calvino Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” Italo Calvino

2. “Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.” Italo Calvino

3. “The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.” Italo Calvino

4. “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” Italo Calvino

5. “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.” Italo Calvino

6. “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?” Italo Calvino

7. “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.” Italo Calvino

8. “I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.” Italo Calvino

9. “Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.” Italo Calvino

10. “If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.” Italo Calvino

11. “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.” Italo Calvino

12. “I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities, above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” Italo Calvino

13. “It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.” Italo Calvino

14. “The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.” Italo Calvino

15. “This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences, so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it.” Italo Calvino

16. “Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.” Italo Calvino

17. “The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.” Italo Calvino

18. “There is no language without deceit.” Italo Calvino

19. “A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.” Italo Calvino

20. “What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?” Italo Calvino

21. “Life is nothing but trading smells.” Italo Calvino

22. “A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.” Italo Calvino

23. “In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.” Italo Calvino

24. “The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.” Italo Calvino

25. “The minute you start saying something, ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness.” Italo Calvino

26. “You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.” Italo Calvino

27. “They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.” Italo Calvino

28. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” Italo Calvino

29. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things, that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.” Italo Calvino

30. “Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.” Italo Calvino

31. “Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.” Italo Calvino

32. “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Italo Calvino

33. “In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.” Italo Calvino

34. “The inferno of the living is not something that will be, if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” Italo Calvino

35. “Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.” Italo Calvino

I hope you enjoyed these Italo Calvino Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.

Check Out Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino 2011:

Have A Great Day!