Cesare Pavese Quotes

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.

All of them, all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop.

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.

It wasn't a country where a man could settle down and rest his head and say to the others, "Here I am for good or ill. For good or ill let me leave in peace." This was what was frightening.

I realised that Nuto was quite right when he said that to live in a hovel or in a palace was one and the same thing, that blood is the same colour everywhere, and that everybody wants to be rich and in love and make their fortune.

Don't mix wine and women, Doro.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Nothing can be added to the rest, to the past. We always begin afresh.
One nail drives out another. But four nails make a cross.

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

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.

I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

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 ourselves.