Cesare Pavese Quotes

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.

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

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

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

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

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.

We never remember days, only moments.

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

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

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

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

To know the world, one must construct it

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?

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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

Love is the cheapest of religions.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

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?

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.

Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

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.

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

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

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

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

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

But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

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.

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