Quotes by "Cesare Pavese"

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

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

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

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

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

Leggendo non cerchiamo idee nuove, ma pensieri già da noi pensati, che acquistano sulla pagina un suggello di conferma. Ci colpiscono degli altri le parole che risuonano in una zona già nostra – che già viviamo – e facendola vibrare ci permettono di cogliere nuovi spunti dentro di noi.

Aveva già allora quegli occhi forati, da gatto, e quando aveva detto una cosa finiva: 'Se sbaglio, correggimi'. Fu così che cominciai a capire che non si parla solamente per parlare, per dire 'ho fatto questo' 'ho fatto quello' 'ho mangiato e bevuto', ma si parla per farsi un'idea, per capire come va questo mondo. Non ci avevo mai pensato prima.

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

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.

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

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

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

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

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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.

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?