Cesare Pavese Men Quotations

When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .

When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.

There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.

The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.

Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.

No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.

Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?