Top 152 Quotes & Sayings by Cesare Pavese

Love is the cheapest of religions.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

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.

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.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

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.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

To know the world, one must construct it

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

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.

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?

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.

A corpse is what's left after waking too often.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

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.

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.

There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

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.

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

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.

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.

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

We never remember days, only moments.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

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.