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Essays and Dialogues

Giacomo Leopardi

"We would no more choose to feed the minds of our countrymen and women with the despairing utterances of the pessimist poet, than we would their bodies with hasheesh. Such melancholy as his clothed in such eloquent words may be the luxury of the idle; it is poison to those who have work to do in the world. It shuts out hope, the very spring of energy; it makes the cheerful steady pursuit of duty a thing utterly beyond human powers. For we can none of us stand alone. Either in human or divine love we must find the mainspring of all life worth living. There must be something outside of ourselves which we regard not with despair, but with hope." -- Handwritten dedication in the book, dated Feb. 19th, 1883