Top 150 Cesare Pavese Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We do not remember days, we remember moments.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

Featured in: Travel Quotes, Forgiveness Quotes

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

— Cesare Pavese

Featured in: Depression Quotes

4. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.”

— Cesare Pavese

5. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

6. “The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.”

— Cesare Pavese

7. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

8. “The only joy in the world is to begin.”

— Cesare Pavese

9. “Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.”

— Cesare Pavese

10. “What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.”

— Cesare Pavese

11. “You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the other person using it to assert his strength.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

15. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

17. “To know the world, one must construct it.”

— Cesare Pavese

18. “Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

20. “Maybe it’s better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.”

— Cesare Pavese

21. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

22. “Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.”

— Cesare Pavese

23. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

25. “There is something indecent in words .”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

29. “You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .”

— Cesare Pavese

30. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

35. “Don’t mix wine and women.”

— Cesare Pavese

36. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

38. “The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.”

— Cesare Pavese

39. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

40. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

41. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

44. “Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

47. “You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.”

— Cesare Pavese

48. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese