45+ Cesare Pavese Quotes

Cesare Pavese is a famous Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, short story writer, and essayist born in the 20th century.

He is one of the major authors of the 20th century with new ideas about the world, joy, life, money, being born, and all the rest. Besides being an Italian poet, literary critic, and one of the major authors, Cesare Pavese is known for going beyond his home country in the 20th century.

Cesare Pavese is known for many quotes that cover areas like life, whole evening and dawn, home country attachments, and the woman-life, and his quotes can help us reflect as we begin the day or take a break from activities.

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

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

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

"We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts."

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

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

"Writing is a fine thing because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd."

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

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

"The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten."

“The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.”

"Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state."

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

"We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong."

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

"Lessons are not given, they are taken."

"The only joy in the world is to begin."

"We obtain things when we no longer want them."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live."

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

"Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?"

"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?"

"No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern."

"Love is the cheapest of religions."

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

"The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities."

“We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.”

"Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man."

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

"The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out, and descend into it."

"Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health."

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

"When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves."

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

"There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man."

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

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

"It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it."

“Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.”

“But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.”

“You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the other person using it to assert his strength.”

“From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.”