Cesare Pavese Quotes

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Love is desire for knowledge.

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

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.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.

Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

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.

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?

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

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

A corpse is what's left after waking too often.

Don't mix wine and women.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .

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

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.

To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will.

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

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.

Not believing in anything is also a religion .

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

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

You don't remember days, you remember moments.