We do not remember days, we remember moments.
— Cesare Pavese
The most exciting Cesare Pavese quotes that are proven to give you inner joy
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
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.
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
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.
It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
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.
We don't remember days; we remember moments.
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?
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.
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?
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
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.
Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing.
It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
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 the world.
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
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.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.
Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition.
One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.
Love is desire for knowledge.
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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.
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.
The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.
Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.
What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.
Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.