Top 100 Cesare's Quotes
#1. We have to get the Diamond. And Cesare's head."
They looked at me.
"Why the head?" Doolittle asked.
"Because it's easy to carry and I can torture it for a long time." And I didn't just say it out loud, did I? I checked their faces. Yep, I did.
Ilona Andrews
#2. You are bruised.'
'Am I? I hadn't noticed.'
'Lucrezia says you killed the bastard.'
... Cesare's hands were shaking. Hard, sun-darkened hands made to hold a sword or lance unflinchingly, but they trembled against my pale skin.
Sara Poole
#4. Happy are those few nations that have not waited till the slow succession of human vicissitudes should, from the extremity of evil, produce a transition to good; but by prudent laws have facilitated the progress from one to the other!
Cesare Beccaria
#5. 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
#7. People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
Cesare Pavese
#8. 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
#9. For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
Cesare Pavese
#10. 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
#11. Not believing in anything is also a religion .
Cesare Pavese
#12. The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.
Cesare Pavese
#13. 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
#14. It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
Cesare Pavese
#15. 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
#16. Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
Cesare Pavese
#17. The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
Cesare Pavese
#18. Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare Pavese
#19. 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
#20. Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
Cesare Pavese
#21. The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
Cesare Pavese
#22. Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
Cesare Pavese
#23. The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
#24. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
Cesare Pavese
#25. The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.
Cesare Beccaria
#26. 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
#27. The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
#28. Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.
Cesare Pavese
#29. We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
Cesare Pavese
#30. No man ever freely surrendered a portion of his own liberty for the sake of the public good; such a chimera appears only in fiction. If it were possible, we would each prefer that the pacts binding others did not bind us; every man sees himself as the centre of all the world's affairs.
Cesare Beccaria
#31. A corpse is what's left after waking too often.
Cesare Pavese
#32. I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.
Cesare Pavese
#33. Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
Cesare Pavese
#34. Louis-Cesare. It's good to finally have you in hand.
Karen Chance
#35. It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone ...
Cesare Pavese
#36. Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?
Cesare Pavese
#37. Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
Cesare Pavese
#38. If I'm not supposed to be awake, why are you here?" I mumbled.
"To be the little spoon.
Karen Chance
#39. Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.
Cesare Pavese
#40. Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Cesare Pavese
#41. What's to become of us? We can't go on like this."
"Yes, we can go on like this," said Cesare. "We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.
Penelope Fitzgerald
#42. 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
#43. Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'
Cesare Lombroso
#44. I'm driving," Louis-Cesare said, sliding into the low seat as easily as if he'd done it a hundred times. "You're drunk."
I wished. "I had all of two beers, mostly for the water content."
"If you needed water, why didn't you drink water?"
"I don't like water.
Karen Chance
#46. If there were an exact and universal scale of punishments and crimes, we would have a fairly reliable and shared instrument to measure the degree of tyranny and liberty, of the basic humanity or malice of the different nations.
Cesare Beccaria
#47. 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
#48. We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
Cesare Pavese
#49. 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
#51. If the same punishment is prescribed for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, then men will face no stronger deterrent from committing the greater crime if they find it in their advantage to do so.
Cesare Beccaria
#52. You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.
Cesare Pavese
#53. 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
#54. Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
Cesare Pavese
#55. I will lead mankind into a new world! You cannot kill me! No man can murder me!
Cesare Borgia
#56. Louis-Cesare slowly pulled himself into a half-standing position against the side of the winery.'What? Did you think one little mage was going to do me in?' He swallowed hard. 'Hell, that was just a warm-up.
Karen Chance
#57. (About Cesare Borgia) What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes? Such was the man that Machiavel prefers to all the great geniuses of his time, and to the heroes of antiquity, and of which he finds the life and action make a good example for those that fortune favors.
Frederick The Great
#58. 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
#60. Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
Cesare Pavese
#61. 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
#62. The murder that is depicted as a horrible crime is repeated in cold blood, remorselessly.
Cesare Beccaria
#63. I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.
Cesare Pavese
#64. Meanwhile we arrived at our lane and the sight of the olive tree rubbed me the wrong way. I began to see that no spot is less habitable than a place where one has been happy.
Cesare Pavese
#65. But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
Cesare Pavese
#66. The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.
Cesare Pavese
#67. How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
Cesare Pavese
#68. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
#69. One must look for one thing only, to find many.
Cesare Pavese
#70. We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
Cesare Pavese
#71. The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese
#72. One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
Cesare Pavese
#73. Nothing could be more dangerous than following the popular maxim whereby it is the spirit of the law that must be consulted. This is an embankment that, once broken, gives way to a torrent of opinions.
Cesare Beccaria
#74. 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
#75. [G]enius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity . . .
Cesare Lombroso
#76. You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.
Cesare Pavese
#77. The cadence of suffering has begun - Cesare Pavese
I
am
in
pieces.
Jennifer Niven
#79. The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
Cesare Pavese
#80. Easy, simple and great laws, which await nothing but a sign from the lawgiver to spread prosperity and vigour throughout the nation, laws which would earn him immortal hymns of gratitude down the generations, are those which are least considered or least wanted.
Cesare Beccaria
#81. Men's most superficial feelings lead them to prefer cruel laws. Nevertheless, when they are subjected to them themselves, it is in each man's interest that they be moderate, because the fear of being injured is greater than the desire to injure.
Cesare Beccaria
#83. The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes, and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact.
Cesare Beccaria
#85. The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
Cesare Pavese
#86. 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
#87. A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
Cesare Pavese
#88. The laws receive their force and authority from an oath of fidelity, either tacit or expressed, which living subjects have sworn to their sovereign, in order to restrain the intestine fermentation of the private interest of individuals.
Cesare Beccaria
#89. If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
Cesare Pavese
#90. 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
#91. The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.
Cesare Pavese
#92. The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.
Cesare Lombroso
#93. Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Cesare Pavese
#94. Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
Cesare Pavese
#96. When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.
Cesare Pavese
#97. When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
Cesare Pavese
#98. In the Garden of Eden Eve showed more courage than Adam.. when the serpent offered the forbidden fruit.
She knew that there was something better than paradise
Cesare Borgia
#99. The severity of punishments ought to be relative to the state of the nation itself. Stronger and more easily felt impressions have to be made on a people only just out of the savage state. A lightning strike is needed to stop a fierce lion who is provoked by a gunshot.
Cesare Beccaria
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