Quotes by Cesare Pavese
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No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
One must look for one thing only, to find many.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
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.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
The only joy in the world is to begin.
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.
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
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.
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?
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.
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.
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.
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