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You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

Cesare Pavese

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

Enjoyment Life Love Pain
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
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.
CESARE PAVESE

Greatness Happiness Important Intensity Love Lover
I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
CESARE PAVESE

Company Evening Mirror Myself
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
CESARE PAVESE

Contemporary Existence History Woman
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
CESARE PAVESE

Knowledge Lesson Wisdom
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.
CESARE PAVESE

Costume Old Party Word Yourself
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
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
We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
CESARE PAVESE

Rest Right Work
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
CESARE PAVESE

Combination Happiness Writing Yourself
The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
CESARE PAVESE

Angry Charity Himself Live Man Pain Share
But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
CESARE PAVESE

Interest Lost Stupidity Time Wisdom
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
CESARE PAVESE

Feeling Heart Ourselves Word
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

Hide Life Lose People Trick Worst
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
CESARE PAVESE

Artist Monk State
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .
CESARE PAVESE

Insult Man Refusal Suffering Yourself
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE

Cheap Love One Liner Religion
One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.
CESARE PAVESE

Better Children Oneself Stop Trouble
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

Friendship Grief Herself Loss Stupidity Yourself
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
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
CESARE PAVESE

Purpose Reality Service Suffering Truth
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
Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
CESARE PAVESE

Enough Fools Fortune Intelligence Man
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
CESARE PAVESE

Discussion Logic Philosophy Woman
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
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

You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

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You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

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