Cesare Pavese quotes - page 4

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. (Cesare Pavese)
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared. View quote
Cesare Pavese
It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone... View quote
Cesare Pavese
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body. View quote
Cesare Pavese
We are all capable of evil thoughts, but only very rarely of evil deeds: we can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts. View quote
Cesare Pavese
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering . View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Lessons are not given, they are taken. View quote
Cesare Pavese
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? (Cesare Pavese)
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue. View quote
Cesare Pavese
There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery. View quote
Cesare Pavese
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. View quote
Cesare Pavese
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? View quote
Cesare Pavese
All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit. View quote
Cesare Pavese
One must look for one thing only, to find many. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time. View quote
Cesare Pavese
We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own. View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. (Cesare Pavese)
There is something indecent in words . View quote
Cesare Pavese
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.) View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese