Quote

We obtain things when we no longer want them.

Cesare Pavese

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Things
Obtain
Longer

More quotes by Cesare Pavese

Image
I was happy enough I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.
Cesare Pavese
Image
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
Image
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare Pavese
Image
Don't mix wine and women.
Cesare Pavese
Image
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.
Cesare Pavese
Image
Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
Cesare Pavese
Image
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
Cesare Pavese
Image
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
Image
Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
Cesare Pavese
Image
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
Image
It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.
Cesare Pavese
Image
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
Cesare Pavese
Image
Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
Cesare Pavese
Image
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
Image
We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
Cesare Pavese
Image
You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
Cesare Pavese
Image
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Cesare Pavese
Image
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
Image
The only joy in the world is to begin.
Cesare Pavese
Image
Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
Cesare Pavese