Thoughts (Hesperus Classics) - Softcover

'The 4,500 pages of Leopardi s notebooks end, in December 1832, with a poignant observation: ''The most unexpected thing that happens to you when you enter society, and often when you have grown old there, is to find the world just as they have described it and as you know and believe it to be in theory.'' The 'Thoughts' can be read as the fragmentary record of that discovery.' --Times Literary Supplement

'For Edoardo Albinati, who has written the foreword to this translation (by J.G. Nichols), Leopardi is a poet ''of almost unbearable purity'' who transfigures a kind of contrary intellectual energy which is essentially, and gloriously, adolescent. These maxims combine the urbanity of Voltaire and La Rochefoucauld with the rhapsodic immaturity of such artists, closer home, as Giovanni Pascoli and Pier Paolo Pasolini.' --Indian Telegraph

Still unfinished at the time of his death, Thoughts, now in its first English translation, represents Giacomo Leopardi’s urgent desire to organize his lifetime’s observations of mankind, life, and the world. Written by the greatest Italian poet and thinker of the 19th century, these timeless musings contain immense philosophical and psychological insight. Ranging from mankind to nature, social order to the individual soul, they reveal a man of brilliance struggling to reconcile all that he sees around him.