Cesare Pavese - Man Quotes

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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
Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

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

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

Cesare Pavese
When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.

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

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.

Cesare Pavese