Cesare Pavese Quotes

Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee?

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty, insufficient, dependent, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair.

Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of use weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.

The heart of Jesus is compassionate and understanding. It has felt the sting of ingratitude, and when my heart suffers from that same offense, I can turn to him, and he understands my feelings.

She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn't go on. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering, or the total absence of meaning in their lives.

They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.

You were right and I was wrong. When life hurts more than death, it is not worth living.

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

The victims of ennui paralyze all the grosser feelings by excess, and torpify all the finer by disuse and inactivity. Disgusted with this world, and indifferent about another, they at last lay violent hands upon themselves, and assume no small credit for the sang froid with which they meet death. But, alas! such beings can scarcely be said to die, for they have never truly lived.

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.

The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

Women all want to be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what.