Cesare Pavese Quotes

99 Sourced Quotes

At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defences. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

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.

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

Cesare Pavese
When they're dealing with the dead, priests are always right.

Cesare Pavese
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.

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

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

Cesare Pavese
Pity was always a waste of one's time.
Existence is terrible, pity won't change that.

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

Cesare Pavese
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

Cesare Pavese
One cannot know one's own style and consciously employ it. One always uses a pre-existent style, unconsciously molding it into something fresh.

Cesare Pavese
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Cesare Pavese
Waiting is still an occupation. It's having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

Cesare Pavese
I have knocked about the world enough to know that one lot of flesh and blood is as good as another. But that's why you get tired and try to put down roots. To find somewhere where you belong so that you are worth more than the usual round of the seasons and last a bit longer.

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?

Cesare Pavese
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.

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

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.

Cesare Pavese
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.

Cesare Pavese
Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.

Cesare Pavese
Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

Cesare Pavese
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.

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

Cesare Pavese
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.

Cesare Pavese
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?

Cesare Pavese
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.

Cesare Pavese
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.

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.

Cesare Pavese
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.

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

Cesare Pavese