Cesare Pavese Quotes

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

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

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

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

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The thing most feared in secret always happens ... All it needs is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It needs humility not pride. I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more.

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

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

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

The cadence of suffering has begun.

You dont remember days, you remember moments

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

That's the one immortal thing about a mortal, Leucò. The memory he carries with him, the memory he leaves behind him. That is what names and words are. When they remember even men smile. A smile of resignation.

All is the same
time has gone by
some day you come
some day you'll die
someone has died
long time ago.

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

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

There is something indecent in words .

Beggar: There was a time when we didn't exist, Oedipus. That means that even the deepest desires of our heart, our blood, our moments of awakening have sprung from nothing. Even your desire to escape destiny is perhaps destiny. It isn't we who made our own blood. It's enough to feel it and live like free man, as the oracle bids us.
Oedipus: Yes, so long as a man is still searching. You had the luck never to reach your goal. But the day comes when you go back to Cithaeron, you forget everything and the mountain seems to bring back your childhood. You look at it day after day and maybe you climb it. Then someone tells you that you were born up there. And everything crumbles.

We never remember days, only moments.

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

Don't mix wine and women.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man

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.

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).

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.

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

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.

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.

She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Love is desire for knowledge.

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

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.

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

If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

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

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

Indifference

This hate has blossomed like a living love,
grieving, watching its own exhaustion.
It seeks a face, it seeks flesh, as though it were love.

The worldly flesh and the voices that spoke
are dead, all has shuddered away,
all life hangs on a voice.
Days pass in bitter ecstasy to the sad
caress of the voice that returns
and drains the blood from our faces. Not without sweetness
that voice returns to the mind exhausted
and trembling: once it trembled for me.

But the flesh does not tremble. Only love
could set it alight, this hate seeks it out.
All the possessions, all the flesh and all the voices
in the world cannot equal the burning caress
of that body and those eyes. In the bitter ecstasy
that kills itself, this hate still finds
each day a glance, a broken word,
and grasps them, hungrily, like love.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

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

You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the other person using it to assert his strength.

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 .

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

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

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

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.

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.

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.

Now that I've seen what 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.

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

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

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

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.

Even something harsh and difficult is a comfort if we choose it ourselves. If it is imposed on us by others, it is agony.