Cesare Pavese's Quotes

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

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

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

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

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

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

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

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

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

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

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

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

The only joy in the world is to begin.

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.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

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.

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?