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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

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
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
CESARE PAVESE

Combination Happiness Writing Yourself
Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
CESARE PAVESE

Power Single Strength Willing
Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
CESARE PAVESE

Himself Strong Weakness Woman
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
CESARE PAVESE

Hands Mouth Ready Willing
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
CESARE PAVESE

Contemporary Existence History Woman
One must look for one thing only, to find many.
CESARE PAVESE

Finding Oneself Search
Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.
CESARE PAVESE

Love Lover Naked Sight
But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
CESARE PAVESE

Interest Lost Stupidity Time Wisdom
Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
CESARE PAVESE

Born Complete Difference Perfection
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man – the one he used to be.
CESARE PAVESE

Boy Growth Himself Man Philosophy Wisdom Youth
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.
CESARE PAVESE

Costume Old Party Word Yourself
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

Insecurity Man Ready Sacrifice Sick Yourself
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
CESARE PAVESE

Enjoyment Life Love Pain
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

Enjoyment Life Mad Ourselves People Suffering True
The only joy in the world is to begin.
CESARE PAVESE

Beginning Job One Liner World
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE

Happiness Love Poetry Remember Share Writing
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 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
There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
CESARE PAVESE

Day Feeling Forgiveness Himself Stupidity
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
CESARE PAVESE

Author Dreams End Yourself
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
CESARE PAVESE

Knowledge Lesson Wisdom
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
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
CESARE PAVESE

Ambition Origin Sense Sin
A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.
CESARE PAVESE

Clear Conscience Spirit Suffering Thinking World
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
Not believing in anything is also a religion .
CESARE PAVESE

Believe Religion Wisdom

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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