Cesare Pavese Quotes - Page 4

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

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

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

Don't mix wine and women.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

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.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

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

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

Not believing in anything is also a religion .

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

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.

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

To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.

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

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.

Love is desire for knowledge.