Cesare pavese quotes

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?

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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.

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

A corpse is what's left after waking too often.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

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

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.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

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.

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

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

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

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

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

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

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

To know the world, one must construct it

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.

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.

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

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

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

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

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.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

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

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

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.

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

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.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

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.

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.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

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

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

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

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 .

You don't remember days, you remember moments.

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

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.

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.

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.

We never remember days, only moments.

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

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.

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.

Love is desire for knowledge.

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

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

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

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.

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

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.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

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?

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

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

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

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

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

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial 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.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

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.

There is something indecent in words .

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

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

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

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?

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

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

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

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)

Don't mix wine and women.

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.

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

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

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.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

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.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

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.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

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

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children.

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

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.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.

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

Not believing in anything is also a religion .

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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.

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.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.