Top 150 Cesare Pavese Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

52. “From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.”

— Cesare Pavese

53. “Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.”

— Cesare Pavese

54. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

55. “Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

57. “Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be “lifelong”? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?”

— Cesare Pavese

58. “War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.”

— Cesare Pavese

59. “We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.”

— Cesare Pavese

60. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

61. “I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else’s understanding.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

63. “In sostanza chiedevo un letargo, un anestetico, una certezza di essere ben nascosto. Non chiedevo la pace nel mondo, chiedevo la mia.”

— Cesare Pavese

64. “Sono libri, – disse lui, – leggici dentro fin che puoi. Sarai sempre un tapino se non leggi nei libri.”

— Cesare Pavese

65. “Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will...”

— Cesare Pavese

66. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

67. “It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.”

— Cesare Pavese

68. “Love is the cheapest of religions.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

70. “The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

72. “You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.”

— Cesare Pavese

73. “When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

75. “Un paese ci vuole, non fosse che per il gusto di andarsene via.”

— Cesare Pavese

76. “There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.”

— Cesare Pavese

77. “Not believing in anything is also a religion .”

— Cesare Pavese

78. “Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.”

— Cesare Pavese

79. “For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.”

— Cesare Pavese

80. “One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

82. “We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.”

— Cesare Pavese

83. “You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

85. “Work alone isn’t enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

88. “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?”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

90. “When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

92. “But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

94. “The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.”

— Cesare Pavese

95. “Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.”

— Cesare Pavese

96. “No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.”

— Cesare Pavese

97. “The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.”

— Cesare Pavese

98. “In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese