Cesare Pavese Quotes
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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
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A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
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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.
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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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.
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If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is something indecent in words
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The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
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Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
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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.
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In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.
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To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
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We obtain things when we no longer want them.