“All things that are called evil are truly evil, and those that are called good are truly good.”Giacomo Leopardi · Zibaldone · 1832 · pagina manuscrisului 4172
Common names don't lie: what you feel as evil is truly evil, not a disguised lesson.
In a thinker famous for pessimism, the claim is strikingly confident: common names are not illusions but correct verdicts. Suffering, injustice, and illness are genuinely negative, not disguised lessons or necessary evils; pleasure and good are real, not traps. The mechanism is a validation of direct experience against philosophies that relabel evil as good. When an employer calls clear exploitation a growth opportunity, Leopardi refuses the verbal swindle.
Leopardi does more than validate direct experience; he turns ordinary language into a trustworthy moral instrument. The words we have used all our lives — pain, injustice, joy — are not naive labels but conclusions accumulated across generations. Refined philosophy that corrects them often claims to know better than our own body. But when a doctor calls a pain you clearly feel mere tiredness, you do not retract the sensation; you name it again, plainly. The idea pushes further into a question: who has the authority to rename reality, and in whose interest do they do it?
Why it matters In a culture that rebrands everything — burnout becomes engagement, loss becomes opportunity — the line grants permission to call things by their real names.