Best 132 quotes of Cesare Pavese on MyQuotes

Cesare Pavese

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    Don't mix wine and women.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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).

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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 .

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    Lessons are not given, they are taken.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Cesare Pavese

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