black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

Cesare Pavese

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

Destiny Discover Experience Life Ourselves Peace Search
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

Addition Complication Live Mistake Right Work
Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.
CESARE PAVESE

Memories Remember Reveal Time
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

Action Disappear Fall Quiet Submission Suicide
Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.
CESARE PAVESE

Love Lover Naked Sight
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

Born Love Thinking World
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
CESARE PAVESE

Occupation Patient Terrible
We never remember days, only moments.
CESARE PAVESE

Day Moments Remember
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

Boy Growth Himself Man Philosophy Wisdom Youth
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.
CESARE PAVESE

Costume Old Party Word Yourself
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

Effort Experience Future Past Skills Technique World Yourself
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
CESARE PAVESE

Art Believe Live Lying
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
CESARE PAVESE

Activity Time
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
CESARE PAVESE

Drop End Life Party
Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
CESARE PAVESE

Money Oneself
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

Exception Life Live Point Yourself
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
CESARE PAVESE

Descend Escape Sound
Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
CESARE PAVESE

Character Nature Suicide
What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.
CESARE PAVESE

Access Desire Oneself Possession Woman Worth
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
CESARE PAVESE

Hands Mouth Ready Willing
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
CESARE PAVESE

Brutal Man Slow Time Willing
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
CESARE PAVESE

Beginning Heart Night Suffering
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

Love Man Operation Relationship True Wake Up
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE

Happiness Love Poetry Remember Share Writing
To know the world, one must construct it.
CESARE PAVESE

Construction World
To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
CESARE PAVESE

Comfortable Cry Injustice Wrong Yourself
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
CESARE PAVESE

Complete Man Success Transcendence Work

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Cesare Pavese Quotes