From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.
CESARE PAVESEFor women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
More Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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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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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We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.
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It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.
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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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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 whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
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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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Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
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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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I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.
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Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
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It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.
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We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
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You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.
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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 only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
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I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else’s understanding.
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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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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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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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One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.
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A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.
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The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
CESARE PAVESE