CESARE PAVESE

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

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.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.