240 Quotes by Cesare Pavese

Work alone isn’t enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

To know the world, one must construct it.

Maybe it’s better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest – thought, action – is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

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.

I’ve discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it.

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

Sono libri, – disse lui, – leggici dentro fin che puoi. Sarai sempre un tapino se non leggi nei libri.