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.
– Cesare Pavese
Contraries are cured by contraries.
– Cesare Pavese
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
– Cesare Pavese
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
– Cesare Pavese
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
– Cesare Pavese
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
– 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?
– Cesare Pavese
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
– Cesare Pavese
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– 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.
– Cesare Pavese
Love is the cheapest of religions.
– Cesare Pavese
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
– Cesare Pavese
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.
– Cesare Pavese
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
– Cesare Pavese
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
– Cesare Pavese
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
– Cesare Pavese
The only joy in the world is to begin.
– Cesare Pavese
No woman marries for money they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.