Cesare Pavese Quotes
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The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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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.
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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.
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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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A corpse is what's left after waking too often.
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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.
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The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
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We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
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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.
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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.
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Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
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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).
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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
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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.
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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.
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The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.