Cesare Pavese Quotes

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

- Cesare Pavese

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

- Cesare Pavese

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

- Cesare Pavese

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

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

- Cesare Pavese

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

- Cesare Pavese

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

- Cesare Pavese

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

- Cesare Pavese

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

- Cesare Pavese

Love is the cheapest of religions.

- Cesare Pavese

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

- Cesare Pavese

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

- Cesare Pavese

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

- Cesare Pavese

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

- Cesare Pavese

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

- Cesare Pavese

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

- Cesare Pavese

The only joy in the world is to begin.

- Cesare Pavese

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

- Cesare Pavese

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

- Cesare Pavese

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

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

- Cesare Pavese

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

- Cesare Pavese

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

- Cesare Pavese

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

- Cesare Pavese

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

- Cesare Pavese