Cesare Pavese
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.Collection: Art
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.Collection: Age
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.Collection: Power
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.Collection: Life
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?Collection: Imagination
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.Collection: Love
We do not remember days, we remember moments.Collection: Life
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.Collection: Travel
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.Collection: Strength
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
The only joy in the world is to begin.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
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.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.Collection: Avoiding
We never remember days, only moments.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Dream
The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.Collection: Joy
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .Collection: Believe
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.Collection: Time
No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.Collection: Men
We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.Collection: Two
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.Collection: Real
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.Collection: Depression
We obtain things when we no longer want them.Collection: Want
It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.Collection: Cry
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.Collection: Art
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 as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.Collection: Mean
We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.Collection: Thinking
Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.Collection: Reality
There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.Collection: Life
A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.Collection: Son
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 all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.Collection: Secret
Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Maturity
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Men
Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.Collection: Sweet
The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.Collection: Past