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Lessons are not given, they are taken.

Cesare Pavese

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.
CESARE PAVESE

Effort Experience Future Past Skills Technique World Yourself
It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.
CESARE PAVESE

Alone Born Cry Death Point
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
CESARE PAVESE

Activity Time
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
Love is desire for knowledge.
CESARE PAVESE

Desire Knowledge Love One Liner
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
The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
CESARE PAVESE

Alive Beginning Goodness Job Moments World
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
CESARE PAVESE

Goodness Reason Suicide
A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
CESARE PAVESE

Creation Dreams End Intelligence Present
One must look for one thing only, to find many.
CESARE PAVESE

Finding Oneself Search
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
CESARE PAVESE

Enjoyment Life Love Pain
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.
CESARE PAVESE

Action Destiny Fate Himself Reaction
One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.
CESARE PAVESE

Better Children Oneself Stop Trouble
We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
CESARE PAVESE

Avoid Freedom Live Ourselves
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
CESARE PAVESE

Author Dreams End Yourself
We want Realism’s wealth of experience and Symbolism’s depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
CESARE PAVESE

Balance Deep Feeling Opposite Problem Reality Wealth

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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