Don’t mix wine and women.
CESARE PAVESEGreat 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.
More Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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 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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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.
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Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
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You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.
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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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But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
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The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
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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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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
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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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Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.
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Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
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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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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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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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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
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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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To know the world, one must construct it.
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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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When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
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Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
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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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