Cesare Pavese Quotes

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.

Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it if only within himself, and of himself self only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

There is truth in all things, if you understand them well.

You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.