Best 132 quotes of Cesare Pavese on MyQuotes

Love is desire for knowledge.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.

Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.

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

Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.

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.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will.

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

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.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The only joy in the world is to begin.

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

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.

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

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.

The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

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

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.

There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.

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

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

To know the world, one must construct it

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

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.