Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
– Cesare Pavese
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
– Cesare Pavese
Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the
effort of understanding that they are free.
– Cesare Pavese
From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a
cigarette.
– Cesare Pavese
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
– Cesare Pavese
What doesn’t slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.
– Cesare Pavese
The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of
their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel
betrayed.
– Cesare Pavese
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
– Cesare Pavese
Love is the cheapest of religions.
– Cesare Pavese
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying
vacuum it would be!
– Cesare Pavese
Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
– Cesare Pavese
There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– Cesare Pavese
Don’t mix wine and women.
– Cesare Pavese
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar
comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the
essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or
what we imagine of it.
– Cesare Pavese
You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.
– Cesare Pavese
Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
– Cesare Pavese
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
– Cesare Pavese
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
– Cesare Pavese
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?
– Cesare Pavese
He told me that it isn’t what you do but how you do it that shows whether you are clever or not.
– Cesare Pavese
How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
– Cesare Pavese
War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all
regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
– Cesare Pavese
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
– Cesare Pavese
People who don’t know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the
hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don’t understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
– Cesare Pavese
Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
– Cesare Pavese
Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.
– Cesare Pavese
The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning,
always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking – as when one is in prison, or ill, or
stupid, or when living has become a habit – one might as well be dead.
– Cesare Pavese
But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– Cesare Pavese
Love is desire for knowledge.
– Cesare Pavese
Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.
– Cesare Pavese
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– Cesare Pavese
But she didn’t laugh. “When you have children,” she said, staring at her glass, “you accept
life. Do you accept life?”
– Cesare Pavese
When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.
– Cesare Pavese
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
– Cesare Pavese
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– Cesare Pavese