Francesco Petrarca

Literature Italian 1304 – 1374 102 quotes

An Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, one of the earliest humanists.

Quotes by Francesco Petrarca

It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

On the Remedies for Both Good and Bad Fortune

The greatest wealth is health.

Letters

The only true failure is the failure to try.

Letters

Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.

Letters

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Letters

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Letters

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

Letters

The only constant in life is change.

Letters

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

Letters

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Letters

Rarely is anything great or beautiful which is not also sublime.

Secretum 1350

Love is the salt of life.

Canzoniere 1340

I find no peace, and all my war is done.

Canzoniere 1327

The pleasant bookshelves of the past, which could not speak and yet spoke to me, have ceased to speak, and I have ceased to hear.

Letters to Posterity 1370

Virtue is the health of the soul.

De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae 1348

To begin the same way every day is to live in chains.

Letters 1360

Books have led me to a knowledge of myself.

Secretum 1335

What I have done is worthy of great praise, but what I have left undone is worthy of greater.

Letters 1374

The mad passion for study has consumed my life.

Letters to Posterity 1357

Laura in the laurel, death in the laurel.

Canzoniere 1348