Cesare Pavese Quotes
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Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
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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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Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
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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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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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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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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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There is something indecent in words
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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.
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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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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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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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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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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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Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.