Talk:Cesare Pavese

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Unsourced

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• 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.

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

• At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

• Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

• Contraries are cured by contraries.

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

• Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

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

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

• If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
  • The earliest printed attribution to Pavese that I could find on Google books was from 2009. On the other hand, there were a number of earlier attributions to Glenn Clark. --Hughh (talk) 13:57, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

• 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?

• Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Love is the cheapest of religions.

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

• No one ever kills himself for the love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

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

• Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.

• 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.

• Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time / is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

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

• The only joy in the world is to begin.

• The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

• 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.

• When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

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

• To know the world one must construct it. (not a reliable source, but Alan Kay's DynaBook: http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf)

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“You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength”

I have seen the quote: “You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength” attribited to Cesare Pasese. If this can be erified, it will make a good addition to the article. Thanks! Lbeaumont (talk) 12:46, 7 March 2024 (UTC)