Cesare Pavese
In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).Collection: Art
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.Collection: Whole Life
The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.Collection: Revenge
You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.Collection: Waiting
How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?Collection: Night
The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.Collection: Generations
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.Collection: Writing
I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.Collection: Morning
The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.Collection: Fate
Work alone isn't enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.Collection: Dream
Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: Appreciation
Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.Collection: People
When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.Collection: Men
Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.Collection: Real
Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.Collection: People
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.Collection: Death
Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.Collection: Love Is
The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.Collection: Thinking
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.Collection: Long
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?Collection: Men
Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.Collection: Men
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.Collection: Writing
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.Collection: Writing
All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.Collection: Sacred
It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.Collection: Girl
There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.Collection: Revenge
Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.Collection: Sight
Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.Collection: Strong
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.Collection: Dream
When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselvesCollection: Echoes
Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Fighting
You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.Collection: Home
A corpse is what's left after waking too often.Collection: Waking
From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigaretteCollection: Destiny
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)Collection: Eye
Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.Collection: War
We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.Collection: Art
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.Collection: Perfect
Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.Collection: Thoughts Of Death
What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.Collection: Lying
The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.Collection: Loneliness
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.Collection: Patience
To know the world, one must construct itCollection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Destiny
Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.Collection: Intelligent
There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Men