Luigi Pirandello

Love is the attempt to form, in another person, a being for yourself.

Happiness is a mirage that recedes as we approach.

The crowd is the veil of the all too little.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

I am not mad; I am merely awake to the absurdity of it all.

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves to make sense of the past.

The theater is the art of making the invisible evident.

We live in a world where everyone is right in their own eyes.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

My life is a comedy of errors, directed by fate.

The essence of man is not what he is, but what he pretends to be.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

In the end, we are all strangers to ourselves.

The joke is on us; life is the ultimate farce.

Characters in a play have more reality than we do.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

I write because I must, to escape the prison of my mind.

The world is a stage, and we are all poor players.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth.