Best 132 quotes of Cesare Pavese on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.

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?

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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.

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.

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.

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.

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.

Don't mix wine and women.

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.

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

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

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

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.

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

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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).

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.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

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

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?

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 .

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.

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

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

I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it.

I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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.

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

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

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.

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.

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