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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

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
Men
Completing
Succeeds
Transcend
Qualities
Succeed
Quality
Work

More quotes by Cesare Pavese

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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.
Cesare Pavese
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Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
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
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese
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The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
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.
Cesare Pavese
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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
Cesare Pavese
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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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Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
Cesare Pavese
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Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)
Cesare Pavese
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
Cesare Pavese
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There is something indecent in words .
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese
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Love is desire for knowledge.
Cesare Pavese
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The real affliction of old age is remorse.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese