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 PAVESEIt 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.
More Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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.
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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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The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
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A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
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Love is desire for knowledge.
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We never remember days, only moments.
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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.
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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
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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.
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Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.
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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 world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.
CESARE PAVESE






