Top 152 Quotes & Sayings by Cesare Pavese - Page 2

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

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.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

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.

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)

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.

Don't mix wine and women.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

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).

Not believing in anything is also a religion .

But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .

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.

To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.

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.

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.

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.

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

Love is desire for knowledge.

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.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

You don't remember days, you remember moments.

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

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

People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.

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 .

There is something indecent in words .

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.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.