Italo Calvino Quotes

What is aught but as 'tis valued?

A thing is important if anyone think it important..

The terms good and bad indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking or notions, which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf; it is neither good nor bad.

The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.

The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Every word that judges value is circular. 'Good' is 'right' is 'proper' is 'just' is 'good'. But check the examples, and they're not circular at all: Every one says 'makes me happy'.

If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.

You see, if you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

We see what we want to believe.

Experience is only half of experience.

Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.

Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.

I know and see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits opersons called high and worthy.

Many truths which are not believed are called lies,' the Laughing Beast said. 'Mirrors do not themselves lie unless they have been enchanted. Ordinary mirrors merely reflect what is revealed to them. People lie and mirrors reflect people. If your mother feared mirrors in your land, she feared herself.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.

We live in condensations of our imagination

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.