Cesare Pavese

To know the world, one must construct it.

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Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.

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Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

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War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

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We are all capable of evil thoughts, but only very rarely of evil deeds: we can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

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What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.

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What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

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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.

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Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

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