Cesare Pavese Quotes
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There is only one pleasure - that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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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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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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One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
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Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.
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Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
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Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
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When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own - the place where we live - and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves
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Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
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The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.
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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
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He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
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All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God .
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Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
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When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
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It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.
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Love is desire for knowledge.
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You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
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Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.
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Don't mix wine and women.
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Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will...
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We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.