I firmly believe that even lizards and gnats think that the whole world was especially made for their species. So let everyone stick to his own opinion, for nobody could drive it out of his head.
[I]o tengo per fermo che anche le lucertole e i moscherini si credano che tutto il mondo sia fatto a posta per uso della loro specie. E però ciascuno si rimanga col suo parere, che niuno glielo caverebbe di capo.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, May 14, 2025
For Whose Benefit?
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), "Dialogo di un Folletto e di uno Gnomo," Operette Morali (tr. Giovanni Cecchetti):