We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.
CESARE PAVESEBut all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
More Cesare Pavese Quotes
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We want Realism’s wealth of experience and Symbolism’s depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
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The only joy in the world is to begin.
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The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
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One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.
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Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
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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.
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There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
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Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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The real affliction of old age is remorse.
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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
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Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
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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.
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To know the world, one must construct it.
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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.
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It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.
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I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
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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.
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The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
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Love is the cheapest of religions.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
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The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
CESARE PAVESE