From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.
CESARE PAVESEIn general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.
More Cesare Pavese Quotes
-
-
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
CESARE PAVESE -
Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
CESARE PAVESE -
Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
CESARE PAVESE -
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 -
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 -
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
CESARE PAVESE -
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
CESARE PAVESE -
What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.
CESARE PAVESE -
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
CESARE PAVESE -
We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
CESARE PAVESE -
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
CESARE PAVESE -
The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
CESARE PAVESE -
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 -
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE -
It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.
CESARE PAVESE -
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
CESARE PAVESE -
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
CESARE PAVESE -
To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
CESARE PAVESE -
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
CESARE PAVESE -
In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.
CESARE PAVESE -
Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
CESARE PAVESE -
If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
CESARE PAVESE -
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
CESARE PAVESE -
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 -
Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
CESARE PAVESE -
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