Quote

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

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
Years
Idleness
Time
Slowly
Pass
Activity
Short
Hours
Makes
Long
Swiftly

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Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
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Don't mix wine and women.
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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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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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Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
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The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
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The real affliction of old age is remorse.
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To know the world, one must construct it
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The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
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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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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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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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A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.
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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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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.
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When a woman marries she belongs to another man and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.
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A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.
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Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.
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