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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Cesare Pavese

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
CESARE PAVESE

Silence Suffering
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love – any love – reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
CESARE PAVESE

Kill Love Naked Nothing Vulnerable Woman
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
CESARE PAVESE

Purpose Reality Service Suffering Truth
We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
CESARE PAVESE

Goodness Thinking Work
Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
CESARE PAVESE

Death Furious Health Man Point Yourself
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
All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.
CESARE PAVESE

Affection Habit Scared
Not believing in anything is also a religion .
CESARE PAVESE

Believe Religion Wisdom
It 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.
CESARE PAVESE

Enjoyment Happiness Obsession Oneself
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
CESARE PAVESE

Activity Time
The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.
CESARE PAVESE

Continue Ego Live Reason Thinking
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
Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
CESARE PAVESE

Born Complete Difference Perfection
The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
CESARE PAVESE

Activity Fruit Personality Search
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.
CESARE PAVESE

Darkness Evening Face Night Old Soft Talk Whisper Wound
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
CESARE PAVESE

Artist Monk State

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

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