Top 150 Cesare Pavese Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

103. “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

104. “Don’t you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It’s no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It’s called destiny.”

— Cesare Pavese

105. “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?”

— Cesare Pavese

106. “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

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

— Cesare Pavese

108. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

109. “How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?”

— Cesare Pavese

110. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

111. “It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone...”

— Cesare Pavese

112. “The real affliction of old age is remorse.”

— Cesare Pavese

113. “Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.”

— Cesare Pavese

114. “We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.”

— Cesare Pavese

115. “Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

117. “A corpse is what’s left after waking too often.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

119. “Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

122. “When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.”

— Cesare Pavese

123. “Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

125. “It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny .”

— Cesare Pavese

126. “All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

128. “Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.”

— Cesare Pavese

129. “We obtain things when we no longer want them.”

— Cesare Pavese

130. “A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.”

— Cesare Pavese

131. “Love is desire for knowledge.”

— Cesare Pavese

132. “The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.”

— Cesare Pavese

133. “There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.”

— Cesare Pavese

134. “The cadence of suffering has begun.”

— Cesare Pavese

135. “There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.”

— Cesare Pavese

136. “People who don’t know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don’t understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.”

— Cesare Pavese

137. “Della mia infanzia non mi restava altro che l’estate. Le vie strette che sbucavano nei campi da ogni parte, di giorno e di sera, erano i cancelli della vita e del mondo.”

— Cesare Pavese

138. “Someone who has suffered is no longer the same.”

— Cesare Pavese

139. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

140. “Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.”

— Cesare Pavese

141. “Prova a dire ai mortali queste cose che sai.”

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

143. “She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.”

— Cesare Pavese

144. “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.”

— Cesare Pavese

145. “If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.”

— Cesare Pavese

146. “Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.”

— Cesare Pavese

147. “Esistono amori che non siano egoismo, che non vogliano ridurre l’uomo o la donna al proprio comodo?”

— Cesare Pavese

148. “A woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later meets a piece of human wreckage and tries to rescue him. She sometimes succeeds. But a woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later finds a sane, healthy man and makes a wreck of him. She always succeeds.”

— Cesare Pavese

149. “Gli uomini che hanno una tempestosa vita interiore e non cercano sfogo nei discorsi o nella scrittura sono semplicemente uomini che non hanno una tempestosa vita interiore.”

— Cesare Pavese

150. “A quei tempi era sempre festa.”

— Cesare Pavese