Cesare Pavese Quotes

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

We never remember days, only moments.

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.

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

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

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

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

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

The only joy in the world is to begin.

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

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

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

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?

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

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

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 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.

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

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

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

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