Quote

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.

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
Thought
Counts
Come
Mental
Always
Prison
Physical
Rest
Action
Reality
Grips
Past
Pastime

More quotes by Cesare Pavese

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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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War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
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Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)
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One must look for one thing only, to find many.
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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
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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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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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One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
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Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
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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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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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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.
Cesare Pavese
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Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
Cesare Pavese
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There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
Cesare Pavese
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Don't mix wine and women.
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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.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese