“Remembrance is essential and fundamental to poetic feeling.”

Original: La rimembranza è essenziale e principale nel sentimento poetico. — Leopardi places remembered distance at the heart of the imaginative transformation that makes experience poetic. · Zibaldone, entry 4426, 14 December 1828 (Italian)

• Imagination
• Memory
• Poetry

“Once a pleasure is attained, the soul does not cease desiring pleasure, just as it never ceases to think.”

Original: Conseguito un piacere, l’anima non cessa di desiderare il piacere, come non cessa mai di pensare. — Pleasure cannot finally satisfy desire because desire itself is continuous and inseparable from conscious life. · Zibaldone, entry 183, July 1820 (Italian)

• Desire
• Happiness
• Mind

“Boredom exists only in those whose spirit has some substance.”

Original: La noia non è se non di quelli in cui lo spirito è qualche cosa. — For Leopardi, profound boredom is not mere idleness but evidence of a mind whose desires exceed ordinary distractions. · Pensieri, LXVII, published posthumously in 1845 (Italian)

• Desire
• Mind
• Suffering