“Nothing can be added to the rest, to the past. We always begin afresh.
One nail drives out another. But four nails make a cross.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Nothing can be added to the rest, to the past. We always begin afresh. One nail drives out another. But four nails mak…" by Cesare Pavese?
Cesare Pavese photo
Cesare Pavese 137
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator 1908–1950

Related quotes

Walter Savage Landor photo
Guigo I photo

“Without form or comeliness, and nailed to the cross—thus is truth to be adored.”

Guigo I (1083–1136) Cartusian monk

#5
The Meditations of Guigo I, Prior of the Charterhouse

Alfred North Whitehead photo

“Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

Ingmar Bergman photo

“When Jesus was nailed to the cross — and hung there in torment - he cried out — "God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Algot Frövik (Allan Edwall) in Winter Light (1962).
Films
Context: When Jesus was nailed to the cross — and hung there in torment - he cried out — "God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.

Hermann Hesse photo

“In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

Source: Demian (1919), p. 9. Prologue
Context: Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him — for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood. Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men — each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature — are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, story telling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall - and the failure to nail current jelly to a wall is not due to the nail; it is due to the currant jelly.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Letter to William Roscoe Thayer (2 July 1915)
1910s

Joseph Goebbels photo

“Christ is the genius of love and as such the most diametric antipole to Jewry, which is the incarnation of hate. … Christ was the first anti-Jewish opponent of stature. … The Jew is the lie that became flesh. He nailed Christ to the cross, and thus for the first time in history nailed the eternal truth to the cross.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Christus ist das Genie der Liebe, als solches der diametralste Gegenpol zum Judentum, das die Inkarnation des Hasses darstellt. … Christus ist der erste Judengegner von Format. … Der Jude ist die menschgewordene Lüge. In Christus hat er zum erstenmal vor der Geschichte die ewige Wahrheit ans Kreuz geschlagen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Leonard Cohen photo

“Here is your cross,
Your nails and your hill;
And here is your love,
That lists where it will”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"Here It Is"
Ten New Songs (2001)

Mikhail Gorbachev photo

“Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in TIME magazine (9 September 1985)
Context: Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

Glen Cook photo

“Trouble came only where I expected it, from One-Eye, whose motto is that anything not nailed down is his and anything he can pry loose isn’t nailed down.”

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 38, “Invaders of the Shadowlands” (p. 194)

Related topics