Cesare Pavese Quotes

69 quotes in 891 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• We never remember days, only moments.
• Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
• Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What…
• The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
• 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 art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
• There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
• 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…
• Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
• The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
• To know the world, one must construct it
• Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
• 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…
• Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will...
• A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
• For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

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