Cesare Pavese

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

When a man mourns for someone who has played him false it is not for love of her but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it gauge it sound it out and descend into it.

We never remember days, only moments.

We dont remember days we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

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.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

I am the captain of my destiny I do not abandon the ship in hard times. But I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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?

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

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

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.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

A consoling thought what matters is not what we do but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

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.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

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

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

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.

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

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.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.