Cesare Pavese Quotes
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
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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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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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If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
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The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
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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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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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Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
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There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.
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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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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
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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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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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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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The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
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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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The only joy in the world is to begin.
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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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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.
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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
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Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
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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.
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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.