Cesare Pavese Quotes

Love is desire for knowledge.

Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

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.

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

For some time my friend Doro and I had agreed that I would be his guest. I was very fond of Doro, and when he married and went to Genoa to live, I was half sick over it. When I wrote to refuse his invitation to the wedding, I got a dry and rather haughty note replying that if his money wasn't good for establishing himself in a city that pleased his wife, he didn't know what it was good for. Then, one fine day as I was passing through Genoa I stopped at his house and we made peace. I liked his wife very much, a tomboy type who graciously asked me to call her Clelia and left us alone as much as she should, and when she showed up again in the evening to go out with us, she had become a charming woman whose hand I would have kissed had I been anyone else but myself.

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.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself. Or at least to discuss it. There isn't enough discussion in the world.

La difficoltà di commettere suicidio sta in questo: è un atto di ambizione che si può commettere solo quando si sia superata ogni ambizione.

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.