Cesare Pavese Quotes

I listened for the echo, and I heard only praise —

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.

I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.

Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Gratitude evokes grace like the voice and echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.

Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.

A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath'd at the same time.

WHEN YOU BOW deeply to the universe, it bows back; when you call out the name of God, it echoes inside you.

With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

An idea is a feat of association.

Through default or intention, unaware or by design, we not only choose but create the visible outer conditions that are most resonant to our inner state of being.

I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.

The ultimate and dearest - and, again, only - relationship we have is the relationship we have with our thoughts.

My hope is that I'm getting better and wiser. With every book, I have more of myself to pour onto the page.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me.

Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

My approach to newspapers was based on the idea that when you looked at the front page you said: 'Good heavens', when you looked at the middle page you said: 'Holy smoke', and by the time you got to the back pagewell, I'd have to utter a profanity to show how exciting it was.

After me, the Revolution - or, rather the ideas which formed it - will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.

Every word and every deed, every thought and every gesture, even the simple act of paying attention can be a gift and therefore an echo of God’s life in us.