Top 100 Quotes About Pavese
#1. The cadence of suffering has begun - Cesare Pavese
I
am
in
pieces.
Jennifer Niven
#2. 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
#3. Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
Cesare Pavese
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
Cesare Pavese
#7. Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
Cesare Pavese
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.
Cesare Pavese
#11. You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
Cesare Pavese
#13. There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
Cesare Pavese
#14. 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
#15. We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
Cesare Pavese
#17. Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
Cesare Pavese
#18. 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
#19. We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
Cesare Pavese
#20. 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
#21. Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Cesare Pavese
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
Cesare Pavese
#28. Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.
Cesare Pavese
#29. A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
Cesare Pavese
#30. No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .
Cesare Pavese
#34. I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
Cesare Pavese
#35. All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
Cesare Pavese
#36. Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
Cesare Pavese
#37. Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.
Cesare Pavese
#38. 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
#39. If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Pavese
#40. For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
Cesare Pavese
#41. 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
#42. Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
Cesare Pavese
#44. 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
#45. Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
Cesare Pavese
#46. There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
Cesare Pavese
#47. 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
#48. We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
Cesare Pavese
#49. We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God .
Cesare Pavese
#51. What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
Cesare Pavese
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
Cesare Pavese
#56. 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
#57. When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
Cesare Pavese
#58. But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
Cesare Pavese
#59. 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
#60. Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
Cesare Pavese
#61. 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
#63. Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
Cesare Pavese
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
Cesare Pavese
#70. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
#71. One must look for one thing only, to find many.
Cesare Pavese
#72. We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
Cesare Pavese
#73. The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese
#74. One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
Cesare Pavese
#75. 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
#76. You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.
Cesare Pavese
#77. Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
Cesare Pavese
#78. Not believing in anything is also a religion .
Cesare Pavese
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
Cesare Pavese
#85. Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare Pavese
#86. 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
#87. Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
Cesare Pavese
#88. The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
Cesare Pavese
#89. 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
#90. The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
#91. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
Cesare Pavese
#92. 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
#93. If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
Cesare Pavese
#95. The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
Cesare Pavese
#97. The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
Cesare Pavese
#98. 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
#99. A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
Cesare Pavese
#100. 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
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