Quotes from Cesare Pavese

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the human interest the old personality can take in new activities.

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

To know the world, one must construct it

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.

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?

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

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

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

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?

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

The girls are all giggling, then one girl suddenly remembersthe wild goat. Up there, on the hilltop, in the woodsand rocky ravines, the peasants saw him butting his headagainst the trees, looking for the nannies. He's gone wild,and the reason why is this: if you don't make an animal work,if you keep him only for stud, he likes to hurt, he kills.

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 were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.