I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.
— Canzoniere: Selected Poems
Petrarch, born Francesco di Petracco, was an Italian scholar and poet of the early Italian Renaissance and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. His rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with starting the 14th-century Italian Renaissance and the founding of Renaissance humanism.
In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo based his model for the modern Italian language on the works of Petrarch, along with those of Giovanni Boccaccio and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri, and the Accademia della Crusca later endorsed Petrarch as a model for Italian style. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyric poetry. He is also known as the first to develop the concept of the "Dark Ages."
In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo based his model for the modern Italian language on the works of Petrarch, along with those of Giovanni Boccaccio and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri, and the Accademia della Crusca later endorsed Petrarch as a model for Italian style. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyric poetry. He is also known as the first to develop the concept of the "Dark Ages."
True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
To be able to say how much love, is love but little.
Books have led some to learning and others to madness.
To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.
Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
Yet have I oft been beaten in the field, And sometimes hurt," said I, "but scorn'd to yield." He smiled and said: "Alas! thou dost not see, My son, how great a flame's prepared for thee.