Cesare Pavese famous quotes

The only joy in the world is to begin.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Inspirational #Happiness #You Make Me Happy

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Dream #Travel #Home

Lessons are not given, they are taken.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Taken #Lessons #Genocide

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Avoiding

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Life #Luxury #World

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

#Love #Doe #Misery

One must look for one thing only, to find many.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Vision #Looks

We never remember days, only moments.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Time #Remember #Moments

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Love #Life #Friendship

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Women #Desire

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Hands #Giving #Political

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Ambition #Inferiority #Sin

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Life #Art #Lying

To know the world, one must construct it
-- Cesare Pavese

#World #Constructs

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Life #Happiness #Success

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

#Appreciation #Regret #War

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

#Sacrifice #Men #Giving

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Dream #Ends

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Sight #Two #Naked

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Mirrors #Sitting #Evening

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

#Children #Looks #Fine

There is something indecent in words .
-- Cesare Pavese

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Hate #Hatred #Body

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Children #Doe #Realizing

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

#What Matters #Suffering #World

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Intelligent #Men #Fool

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

#Fate #Sick #Desire

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
-- Cesare Pavese

#Ivy #Innuendo

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Memories #Mean #Firsts

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

#Lying #Party #Dark

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Real #Suffering #Purpose

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

#Men

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

#People #Heaven #Way

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

#Men #Thinking #Trying

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Sacred #Affection #Habit

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Son #Generations #Artistic

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
-- Cesare Pavese

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Long #Silence #Suffering

Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Real #Reality #Incredibles

To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Comfort #Done #Injustice

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Fun #Our Words #Might

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

#Blood #Understanding #World

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

#People #Dry #Grass

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .
-- Cesare Pavese

#Believe #Men #Suffering

Not believing in anything is also a religion .
-- Cesare Pavese

#Believe

But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Stupid #Years #Interesting

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Brother #Love You #Wish

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

#Girl #Stupid #Loss

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

#Men #Humiliation #Mourn

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Despise #Plenty

Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Lonely #Writing #Men

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Dream #Knowing #Creation

In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).
-- Cesare Pavese

#Art #Strong #Sex

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

#Generations #Next #Problem

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

#Fate #Destiny #Things Happen

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

#Suicide #Ambition #Difficulty

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God .
-- Cesare Pavese

#People #Care #Littles

We obtain things when we no longer want them.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Want

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
-- Cesare Pavese

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

#Fighting #Years #People

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

#Class #People #Behaviour

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Perfect #Behaviour #Indifference

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Pain #Men #Feelings

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.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Fun #Boys #Remember

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Civilization #Age #Generations

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

#Decision #Action #Reason

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

#Destiny #Fundamentals #Levels

Love is desire for knowledge.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Love Is #Desire

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
-- Cesare Pavese

#Night #Risk #Whole Life

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

#Home #Sleep #Giving

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Suicide #Sadism #Murderer

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

#Thinking #Ego #Reason

Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Men #Would Be #Furious

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

#Morning #Night #Flames

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone...
-- Cesare Pavese

#Cry #Born #Pointless

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Smoking

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

#Lying #Ocean #Sea

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

#Whole Life

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Reality #Imagination #Humans

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

#Art #Opposites #Two

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

#Revenge #Men #Leaving

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Writing #Fire #Ideas

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Inspirational #Forgiveness #Travel

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Perfect #Indifference #Behavior

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Time #Men #Brutal

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Time #Years #Long

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

#Forgiveness #Stupidity #Forgiving

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Life #Young

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Life #Alive #Misery

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Patience #Waiting #Occupation

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Writing #Poetry #Making Love

We do not remember days, we remember moments.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Love #Inspirational #Life

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Acceptance #Personality #Interest

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

#Secret #Defense #Literature

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

#Suicide #Children #Suicidal

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Suicide #Choices #Suffering

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, ***** thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Mean #Fighting #Air

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. 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

#Ideas #Echoes #Vibrations

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.
-- Cesare Pavese

#Sweet #Morning #Stars

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
-- Cesare Pavese

#Destiny #Want #Cigarette