Cesare Pavese

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

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.

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

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

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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

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.

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

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

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

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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

Love is the cheapest of religions.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

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.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

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

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

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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