black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Cesare Pavese

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
CESARE PAVESE

Activity Time
All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.
CESARE PAVESE

Affection Habit Scared
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
CESARE PAVESE

Brutal Man Slow Time Willing
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
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
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
CESARE PAVESE

Discussion Logic Philosophy Woman
We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
CESARE PAVESE

Commitment Failure Wrong
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
CESARE PAVESE

Artist Monk State
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
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
There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
CESARE PAVESE

Alive Happiness Misery
Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
CESARE PAVESE

Born Complete Difference Perfection
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
Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
CESARE PAVESE

Money Oneself
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
CESARE PAVESE

Forget Life Memories Rich
To know the world, one must construct it.
CESARE PAVESE

Construction World

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Cesare Pavese Quotes