All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.
CESARE PAVESEDeath is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
More Cesare Pavese Quotes
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But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
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There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
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The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.
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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.
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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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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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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.
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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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The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
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Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.
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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.
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We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
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The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.
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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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We never remember days, only moments.
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
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Love is desire for knowledge.
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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?
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There is something indecent in words .
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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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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.
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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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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
CESARE PAVESE