240 Quotes by 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?

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.

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.

Don’t you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It’s no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It’s called destiny.

Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be “lifelong”? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?

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.

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

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

We want Realism’s wealth of experience and Symbolism’s depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.