Cesare Pavese Quotes (137 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

La difficoltà di commettere suicidio sta in questo: è un atto di ambizione che si può commettere solo quando si sia superata ogni ambizione.
This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Context: 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.

“Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)”

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XXVI, p. 148

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

Cesare Pavese

The Faber Book of Aphorisms

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 8, p. 105

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 4, p. 24

“Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 16, p. 144

“But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 23, p. 176

“Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 6, p. 36

“What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The real affliction of old age is remorse.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter VIII, p. 49

“Don't mix wine and women, Doro.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 2, p. 13

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The whole plain was like a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XI, p. 67

“Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The devil in the hills (1949), Chapter 18, p. 354

“Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter X, p. 60

“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

Source: The devil in the hills (1949), Chapter 9, p. 319

“There is a reason why I came back to this place—came back here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. It is almost certain that I was not born here; where I was born I don't know. There is not a house or a bit of ground or a handful of dust hereabouts of which I can say: "This was me before I was born."”

Cesare Pavese

Incipit
The moon and the bonfire (1950)

“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

Source: The devil in the hills (1949), Chapter 5, p. 306

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“We obtain things when we no longer want them.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 9, p. 48

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Not believing in anything is also a religion.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 15, p. 139

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“We were very young. I don't think I ever slept that year, but I had a friend who slept even less than I did. Some mornings you could see him strolling up and down in front of the station when the first trains were arriving and leaving.”

Cesare Pavese

Incipit
The devil in the hills (1949)

“When one has made a mistake, one says. "Another time I shall know what to do," when one should say is: "I already know what I shall really do another time."”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.”

Cesare Pavese

The winter of '41-'42
This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“He told them it was only dogs that bark and go for strange dogs, and men set on a dog because it suits them to show that they are still masters, but if the dogs weren't dumb animals they would come to an agreements with each other and start barking at them.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XVIII, p. 107

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