Pietro Aretino
Pietro Aretino
Pietro Aretinowas an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer who wielded immense influence on contemporary art and politics and invented modern literate pornography...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 April 1492
CountryItaly
milk-and-honey ears flattery
Perfumed and gallant words make our ears belch.
eye delight should
Why should the eyes be denied what delights them most?
men birth born
The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.
milk-and-honey ears flattery
There is no food more satiating than milk and honey; and just as such foods produce disgust for the palate, so perfumed and gallant words make our ears belch.
sorry mind age
Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.
children parent our-children
We are the buffoons of our children.
bells cymbals madness
Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.
scholarship property disagreeable
Learning is the property of those who fear to do disagreeable things.
sex lunch desire
Desire is poison at lunch and wormwood at dinner; your bed is a stone, friendship is hateful and your fancy is always fixed on one thing.
men evil would-be
What evil is there in seeing a man possess a woman? Why, the beasts would be more free than we!
pain taverns care
He who has not been at a tavern knows not what a paradise it is. O holy tavern! O miraculous tavern!--holy, because no carking cares are there, nor weariness, nor pain; and miraculous, because of the spits, which themselves turn round and round!
art exercise practice
Flee laziness which while it produces an immediate delight, ends in the sorrow of repentance. And know that nature without exercise is a seed shut up in the pod, and art without practice is nothing.
art father book
Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has it may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art.
art war might
The art of war is like the art of the courtesan; indeed they might be called sisters, since both are slaves of desperation.