Cesare Pavese Quotes

99 Sourced Quotes

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.

Cesare Pavese
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.

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.

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.

Cesare Pavese
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

Cesare Pavese
When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.

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).

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

Cesare Pavese
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

Cesare Pavese