Quotes By Cesare Pavese

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

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

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

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

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

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

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

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

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.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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?

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

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

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.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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.