Cesare Pavese Quotes - Page 2

To know the world, one must construct it

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

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

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

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

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

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

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.

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.

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.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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