Quote

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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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
Passed
Suicide
Difficulty
Committed
Ambition
Beyond

More quotes by 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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The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
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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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The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
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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.
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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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .
Cesare Pavese
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Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
Cesare Pavese
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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
Cesare Pavese
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Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
Cesare Pavese
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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
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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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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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Cesare Pavese
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There is something indecent in words .
Cesare Pavese
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Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.
Cesare Pavese
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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
Cesare Pavese
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When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.
Cesare Pavese
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Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.
Cesare Pavese