Cesare Pavese Quotes & Sayings

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children . — Cesare Pavese

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

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference. — Cesare Pavese

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties. — Cesare Pavese

The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others. — Cesare Pavese

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end. — 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 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

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God . — Cesare Pavese

Lessons are not given, they are taken. — 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

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again. — Cesare Pavese

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

There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life. — Cesare Pavese

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go. — Cesare Pavese

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest. — Cesare Pavese

The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire. — Cesare Pavese

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

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow. — 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

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism. — Cesare Pavese

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

All is the same
time has gone by
some day you come
some day you'll die
someone has died
long time ago. — Cesare Pavese

We never remember days, only moments. — 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

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

Even something harsh and difficult is a comfort if we choose it ourselves. If it is imposed on us by others, it is agony. — Cesare Pavese

Love is the cheapest of religions. — Cesare Pavese

A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

There is something indecent in words . — Cesare Pavese

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

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

The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away. — 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

People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists. — Cesare Pavese

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale - you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath - the night is done. You are light and morning. — Cesare Pavese

Work alone isn't enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it. — 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

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

I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding. — Cesare Pavese

But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting. — 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

You dont remember days, you remember moments — Cesare Pavese

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company. — Cesare Pavese

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose. — 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

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

The real affliction of old age is remorse. — Cesare Pavese

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

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality. — Cesare Pavese

We obtain things when we no longer want them. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

Don't mix wine and women. — Cesare Pavese

If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people. — Cesare Pavese

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

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

Indifference

This hate has blossomed like a living love,
grieving, watching its own exhaustion.
It seeks a face, it seeks flesh, as though it were love.

The worldly flesh and the voices that spoke
are dead, all has shuddered away,
all life hangs on a voice.
Days pass in bitter ecstasy to the sad
caress of the voice that returns
and drains the blood from our faces. Not without sweetness
that voice returns to the mind exhausted
and trembling: once it trembled for me.

But the flesh does not tremble. Only love
could set it alight, this hate seeks it out.
All the possessions, all the flesh and all the voices
in the world cannot equal the burning caress
of that body and those eyes. In the bitter ecstasy
that kills itself, this hate still finds
each day a glance, a broken word,
and grasps them, hungrily, like love. — Cesare Pavese

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

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always. — 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

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship. — Cesare Pavese

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of. — Cesare Pavese

The only joy in the world is to begin. — Cesare Pavese

We don't remember days,we remember moments. — 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

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

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites. — 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

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

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess. — Cesare Pavese

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young. — Cesare Pavese

Love is desire for knowledge. — Cesare Pavese

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come. — Cesare Pavese

Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new. — Cesare Pavese

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own. — Cesare Pavese

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself. — Cesare Pavese

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first? — Cesare Pavese

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

Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny. — Cesare Pavese

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly. — Cesare Pavese

Death Will Come with Your Eyes"

Death will come with your eyes -
this death that accompanies us
from morning till night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or a stupid vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a muted cry, a silence.
As you see them each morning
when alone you lean over
the mirror. O cherished hope,
that day we too shall know
that you are life and nothing.

For everyone death has a look.
Death will come with your eyes.
It will be like terminating a vice,
as seen in the mirror
a dead face re-emerging,
like listening to closed lips.
We'll go down the abyss in silence. — Cesare Pavese

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit. — Cesare Pavese

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches. — Cesare Pavese

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man — 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

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. — Cesare Pavese

A corpse is what's left after waking too often. — 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

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values. — Cesare Pavese

The cadence of suffering has begun. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark. — 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