black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Cesare Pavese

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
CESARE PAVESE

Born Complete Mad Perfection
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

Friendship Grief Herself Loss Stupidity Yourself
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
I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
CESARE PAVESE

Company Evening Mirror Myself
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

Action Disappear Fall Quiet Submission Suicide
We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
CESARE PAVESE

Goodness Thinking Work
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.
CESARE PAVESE

Action Decision Reaction Repeat Result Time
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
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
CESARE PAVESE

Contemporary Existence History Woman
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
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
You don’t remember days, you remember moments.
CESARE PAVESE

Day Moments Remember Yourself
The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
CESARE PAVESE

Break Communication Life Lonely Problem
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
CESARE PAVESE

Descend Escape Sound
When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
CESARE PAVESE

Bright Fire Ideas Poetry Production Writing
Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
CESARE PAVESE

Enough Fools Fortune Intelligence Man

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Cesare Pavese Quotes