"We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God."
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Quote collection
Cesare Pavese quotes (page 7 of 8)
151 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide."
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"Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health."
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"You don't remember days, you remember moments."
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"The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess."
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"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."
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"Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state."
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"There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man."
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"The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark."
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"For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries."
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"It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny ."
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"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 (blood and sex)."
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"When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves"
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"There is something indecent in words ."
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"You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young."
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"In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities."
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"Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone."
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"Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new."
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"A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh."
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"The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire."
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