Benedetto Croce

"All history is contemporary history."

"Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind."

"Language is articulated, limited sound organized for the purpose of expression."

"The mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And this dissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves above the infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them a universal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic to the ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest of that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the present and real: in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reach it. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are put before us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish them with a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves, we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of the moral action..."

"[...] in the first rift between Croce and Gentile, Croce is the closest to original fascism. It is Croce who introduces Georges Sorel, one of the first cultural references of Fascism, into Italian culture; it is Croce who speaks, albeit in a critical dimension, of the ethical state; it is Croce who even encourages fascism and compares it to Cardinal Ruffo's Sanfedist hordes, believing that fascism has the function of sweeping away Bolshevism and the spiritual crisis and restoring the authority of the Italian state. Finally, I recall that it was Croce who suggested Gentile as Minister of Education to implement the school reform project that he, as minister, had initiated during the Giolitti era. In this vision, Fascism has a preparatory function for Croce in restoring true liberalism."

"In reality, Croce made a graft. The distinction became dialectical transition, opposition and overcoming. The vital and economic moment, innocent in itself, became, in its collision with other forms, the negative, the ugly, the error, the evil. Humanistic harmony was broken, and the rupture of equilibrium, the internal contrast, became the driving force of becoming and overcoming... But above all, one must ask whether the “graft”, which is always an artificial operation, has really been successful. This is the question that dramatically troubled Benedetto Croce until the very end."

"When my friends at Il Mondo asked me to speak in commemoration of Benedetto Croce, I hesitated at first. “Every true story,” Croce confessed in one of his last great works, Il carattere della filosofia moderna (The Character of Modern Philosophy), “is always autobiographical.” I became acquainted with Croce's writings in prison and in exile. Reading them revealed to me dialectical, historicist thinking. At the time, it seemed to circulate better than in other areas in the philosophy of praxis, as interpreted by Croce's teacher, Antonio Labriola, and developed by the leading figure of revolutionary anti-Fascism, Antonio Gramsci. It is no coincidence that, commenting on Gramsci's Lettere dalla prigionia (“Letters from Prison”), Croce himself wrote that “as a man of thought, he was one of us”."

"[...] Croce always felt at ease with artists who were fully “sliricati”, totally adhering to a fundamental motif, to a unified state of mind. Artists such as Ludovico Ariosto and Giovanni Verga seemed to have been born especially for him because every page they wrote contained him in his entirety. (p. 43)"