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Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

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
Behaviour
Indifference
Complete
Behavior
Perfect
Born

More quotes by 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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You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.
Cesare Pavese
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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
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Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
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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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.
Cesare Pavese
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Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will.
Cesare Pavese
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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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Don't mix wine and women.
Cesare Pavese
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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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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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
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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.
Cesare Pavese
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How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
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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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Cesare Pavese
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If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Pavese