Cesare Pavese Quotes (32 Quotes)


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

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

    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?

    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.

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


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

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

    No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.


    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.


    To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defence against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. . . . Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage.

    The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

    Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.


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


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



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

    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.

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

    He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

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


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

    Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

    One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

    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.

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

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


    More Cesare Pavese Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Life - World - Love - Art - Money & Wealth - Death & Dying - Memory - Suffering - Light - Religions & Spirituality - Imagination & Visualization - Poetry - Actions - Woman - God - Obstacles - Error & Mistake - Thought & Thinking - Children - View All Cesare Pavese Quotations

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