Quotes from Cesare Pavese

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

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

It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

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?

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

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

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

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.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

Love is desire for knowledge.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

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.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

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.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.