Cesare Pavese Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Cesare Pavese
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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Cesare Pavese
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.

Cesare Pavese
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.

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.

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

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.

Cesare Pavese
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.

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

Cesare Pavese
Work alone isn't enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.

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

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.

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.

Cesare Pavese
War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

Cesare Pavese
There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.

Cesare Pavese
The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.

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

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.

Cesare Pavese