Top 100 Cesare Pavese Quotes
#1. You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.
Cesare Pavese
#2. Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Cesare Pavese
#3. One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
Cesare Pavese
#4. We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
Cesare Pavese
#5. One must look for one thing only, to find many.
Cesare Pavese
#6. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
#7. How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
Cesare Pavese
#8. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own - the place where we live - and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
#9. Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.
Cesare Pavese
#10. Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
Cesare Pavese
#11. Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.
Cesare Pavese
#12. But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
Cesare Pavese
#14. Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
Cesare Pavese
#15. Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
Cesare Pavese
#16. A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
Cesare Pavese
#17. At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
Cesare Pavese
#19. The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
Cesare Pavese
#21. If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
Cesare Pavese
#22. In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
Cesare Pavese
#23. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
Cesare Pavese
#24. The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
#25. Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
Cesare Pavese
#26. The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
Cesare Pavese
#27. Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
Cesare Pavese
#28. Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare Pavese
#29. It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.
Cesare Pavese
#30. In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.
Cesare Pavese
#31. You are like a cloud
Glimpsed between the branches. In your eyes there shines
The strangeness of a sky that isn't yours.
Cesare Pavese
#32. For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
Cesare Pavese
#33. A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.
Cesare Pavese
#35. Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
Cesare Pavese
#36. It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.
Cesare Pavese
#37. We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
Cesare Pavese
#38. But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.
Cesare Pavese
#40. Even something harsh and difficult is a comfort if we choose it ourselves. If it is imposed on us by others, it is agony.
Cesare Pavese
#41. There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
Cesare Pavese
#43. You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
Cesare Pavese
#44. The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
Cesare Pavese
#45. No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.
Cesare Pavese
#46. Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
Cesare Pavese
#47. We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
Cesare Pavese
#48. All is the same
time has gone by
some day you come
some day you'll die
someone has died
long time ago.
Cesare Pavese
#49. A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.
Cesare Pavese
#50. The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.
Cesare Pavese
#51. Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
Cesare Pavese
#52. What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
Cesare Pavese
#54. We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God .
Cesare Pavese
#55. We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
Cesare Pavese
#56. Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.
Cesare Pavese
#57. There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
Cesare Pavese
#58. The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
Cesare Pavese
#60. Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
Cesare Pavese
#61. A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.
Cesare Pavese
#62. Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
Cesare Pavese
#63. All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
Cesare Pavese
#64. I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
Cesare Pavese
#65. When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.
Cesare Pavese
#66. There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.
Cesare Pavese
#67. Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.
Cesare Pavese
#68. Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
Cesare Pavese
#69. Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
Cesare Pavese
#70. Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
Cesare Pavese
#71. Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
Cesare Pavese
#73. You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.
Cesare Pavese
#74. Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
Cesare Pavese
#75. It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone ...
Cesare Pavese
#76. A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
Cesare Pavese
#77. It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
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#78. Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
Cesare Pavese
#79. To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
Cesare Pavese
#80. Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
Cesare Pavese
#81. Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
Cesare Pavese
#82. The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
Cesare Pavese
#83. If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight - they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
#84. There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children .
Cesare Pavese
#85. A corpse is what's left after waking too often.
Cesare Pavese
#86. I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it.
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#88. What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.
Cesare Pavese
#89. Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.
Cesare Pavese
#91. War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
Cesare Pavese
#92. If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.
Cesare Pavese
#93. The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
Cesare Pavese
#94. One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
Cesare Pavese
#95. Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.
Cesare Pavese
#96. It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny .
Cesare Pavese
#97. Work alone isn't enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.
Cesare Pavese
#98. The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
Cesare Pavese
#99. There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
Cesare Pavese
#100. The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
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