Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: “You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.”
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Books, Literature
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Depression
This war burns our houses. It sows dead executed in open squares and roads. It chases us like hares from refuge to refuge. It will end up by forcing us to fight, to wring out an active approval. And the day will come when nobody will be outside the war, neither cowards, nor the sad, nor the lonely…
But I saw the unknown dead, dead members of the Italian Social Republic. If a stranger, an enemy becomes such a thing when he dies, if we stop dead fearing to step over him, it means that even the defeated enemy is someone who after spilling blood must be pacified. This blood must be given a voice and those who spilled it must be justified. It is humiliating to look at certain dead. They are not others
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: War
The only joy in the world is to begin.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Secrets of Success, Beginnings
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Beginnings, Luxury, Wealth
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suicide
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suffering
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Pain, Enjoyment, One liners
Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Freedom
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
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
Topics: Loneliness
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Sin
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
Topics: Imagination
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Cleverness, Love
At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suicide
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Sin, Ambition
The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Realization, Being Ourselves, Awareness, Acceptance
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest—thought, action—is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Reality
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time—is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suffering
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Behavior, Manners
Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
—Cesare Pavese
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: The Present, Thought, Reason, One liners, Memories, Memory
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Hatred, Hate
We don’t remember days; we remember moments.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Memories, Memory, One liners
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
Topics: Life and Living
Love is the cheapest of religions.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Love
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Gerard de Nerval French Poet, Writer
- Guy Debord French Philosopher
- Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) Roman Statesman, Poet
- Karl Marx German Philosopher, Economist
- Leon Trotsky Russian Revolutionary
- Friedrich Engels German Socialist Political Philosopher
- Abbie Hoffman American Political Activist
- Arthur Koestler British Writer, Journalist
- Joseph Stalin Soviet Leader
- Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
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