Cesare Pavese Quotations

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

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

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

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

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

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

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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

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

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

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.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

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.

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

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

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

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.

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?

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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

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

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.''

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will...

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

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

The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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 .

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

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

Love is desire for knowledge.

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

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.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.

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.

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.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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.

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

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

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

We never remember days, only moments.

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

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

To know the world, one must construct it