Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Cesare PaveseRead
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that life is a gift and should be appreciated; those who take it for granted miss its value.
Cesare Pavese highlights the importance of cherishing life, as boredom represents a disconnect from the richness of experiences it offers. The quote implies that mercy is available to all who seek to find joy and meaning in life, whereas those who are indifferent and dissatisfied miss out on the profound beauty that existence can provide.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding passion in what we do.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.
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.
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
Not just in China, but everywhere in the world without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or the side of socialism. Neutrality is mere camouflage; a third road does not exist.
The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.
The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.
Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.
Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.
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