Cesare Pavese Quotes

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

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

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

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

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

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.

We never remember days, only moments.

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

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

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

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

To know the world, one must construct it

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

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

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

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

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.

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.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

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

But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.

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

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

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

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

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

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

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

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.

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

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

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?

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.

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

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

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

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