Cesare Pavese quotes - page 4

Cesare Pavese was an influential Italian novelist, poet, and translator, regarded as one of the leading literary figures of 20th-century Italy. His works often explored themes of loneliness, existential despair, and the complexities of Italian society. He made a lasting impact on modern literature through his innovative style and psychological insight. Here are 159 of his quotes:

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

People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.

Cesare Pavese

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

Cesare Pavese

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone...

Cesare Pavese

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

Cesare Pavese

We are all capable of evil thoughts, but only very rarely of evil deeds: we can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

Cesare Pavese

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

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

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

Cesare Pavese

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

Cesare Pavese

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

Cesare Pavese

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

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

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

Cesare Pavese

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

Cesare Pavese

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

Cesare Pavese

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

Cesare Pavese

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.

Cesare Pavese

There is something indecent in words .

Cesare Pavese

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

Cesare Pavese

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)

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