Quote

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

Cesare Pavese

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Cesare Pavese
Age: 41 †
Born: 1908
Born: September 9
Died: 1950
Died: August 27
Biographer
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Editor
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Cannot
Power
Ounce
Disposition
Increase
Strength
Single

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Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.
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The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
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Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.
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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
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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.
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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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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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In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
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You don't remember days, you remember moments.
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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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It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
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Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
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You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
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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.
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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.
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