Cesare Pavese Quotes - Page 3

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.

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

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

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

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

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

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

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.

There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

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

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

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

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. 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

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.

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.