Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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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From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
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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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Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
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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 man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
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The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
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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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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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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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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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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
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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.
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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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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 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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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
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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.
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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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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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No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.
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When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.