110+ Cesare Pavese Quotes On Introspective, Melancholic And Poignant

Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet and novelist from the 20th century. He was a major figure in Italian literature and was known for his works that explored themes of alienation, loneliness, and the difficulty of communication. He was also a translator of American literature, and his works were heavily influenced by the American authors he read. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Cesare Pavese on life, introspective, melancholic.

Top 10 Cesare Pavese Quotes

1. We do not remember days, we remember moments.
2. Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
3. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
4. 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.
5. It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.
6. The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
7. 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.
8. We don't remember days; we remember moments.
9. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
10. No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Cesare Pavese Image Quotes

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. — Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese Short Quotes

• All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
• Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
• Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
• He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
• Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
• What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
• The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
• Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
• Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
• A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Cesare Pavese Quotes About Life

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? — Cesare Pavese

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

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten. — 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

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

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night? — 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

Cesare Pavese Quotes About Love

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. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

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

Love is the cheapest of religions. — Cesare Pavese

Love is desire for knowledge. — Cesare Pavese

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

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself. — Cesare Pavese

When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust. — Cesare Pavese

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God. — Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese Quotes About World

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world. — Cesare Pavese

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

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience. — Cesare Pavese

To know the world, one must construct it — Cesare Pavese

I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding. — Cesare Pavese

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

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess. — Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese Quotes About Lies

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. — 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

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. — Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese Famous Quotes And Sayings

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid. — Cesare Pavese

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her. — Cesare Pavese

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

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there? — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company. — Cesare Pavese

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state. — Cesare Pavese

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose. — Cesare Pavese

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts. — Cesare Pavese

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him. — Cesare Pavese

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of. — Cesare Pavese

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship. — Cesare Pavese

Don't mix wine and women. — 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

A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself. — Cesare Pavese

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first. — Cesare Pavese

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 — Cesare Pavese

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities. — Cesare Pavese

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

Not believing in anything is also a religion . — Cesare Pavese

But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting. — Cesare Pavese

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny . — Cesare Pavese

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

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

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong. — Cesare Pavese

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always. — Cesare Pavese

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end. — Cesare Pavese

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast. — Cesare Pavese

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. — Cesare Pavese

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

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it. — Cesare Pavese

Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven. — Cesare Pavese

Lessons are not given, they are taken. — Cesare Pavese

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

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties. — Cesare Pavese

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it. — Cesare Pavese

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman. — Cesare Pavese

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first? — Cesare Pavese

You don't remember days, you remember moments. — Cesare Pavese

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette — Cesare Pavese

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

There is something indecent in words . — Cesare Pavese

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit. — Cesare Pavese

I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

Life Lessons by Cesare Pavese

1. Cesare Pavese taught that life should be lived with passion and intensity, and that we should strive to find our own personal meaning and purpose in life.
2. He also believed that true happiness comes from within, and that we should not rely on external sources for our sense of fulfillment.
3. Lastly, he encouraged us to take risks and to embrace change, as it can lead to growth and self-discovery.