Life & Mortality Quote by Giacomo Leopardi

Leopardi turns the sentimental glow of longevity into something closer to a cruel accounting error: the body’s desires keep sending invoices after the bank has closed. The line is built on a brutal asymmetry - “deprives man of all pleasures” while “allowing his appetites to remain” - a neat, almost mechanical description of suffering as mismatch. Pleasure, in his framing, is not a virtue or a reward; it’s a capacity that can be revoked. Appetite, meanwhile, is the stubborn engine that won’t shut off. The horror is not simply decline, but the indignity of wanting.

The second sentence is the real sting. Leopardi isn’t arguing that old age is bad; he’s indicting the human imagination as irrational and cowardly. We fear death, an abstraction, yet “desire old age,” a more statistically reliable catalogue of losses. That paradox reads less like a logical puzzle than a diagnosis of self-deception: people cling to time not because they expect happiness, but because they can’t tolerate the idea of an ending. He’s exposing how survival becomes a reflex that overrides honest judgment.

Context matters: Leopardi’s pessimism wasn’t a pose. Writing in a Romantic era that often treated nature as healer and life as spiritually improving, he’s the heretic insisting nature is indifferent and that progress narratives are comforting fiction. The quote’s intent is to strip away the moral prestige we attach to endurance. Wanting to live longer, he suggests, is not necessarily hope - it can be panic dressed up as prudence.