Cesare Pavese Quotes

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

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.

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

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

To know the world, one must construct it

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.

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.

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.

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.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

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?

Love is the cheapest of religions.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

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

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

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

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

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

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

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.