Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare PaveseRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reality often feels confining, and true engagement with it is necessary for meaningful existence.
In this quote, Cesare Pavese suggests that human life can be likened to a prison where individuals merely exist without truly living or engaging with the realities around them. He emphasizes the importance of confronting and understanding reality, as opposed to being distracted by superficial thoughts and actions which do not contribute to genuine fulfillment.
Themes
RealityExistenceConsciousnessEngagementFulfillment
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about embracing life's challenges.
More from Cesare Pavese
All quotes →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.
Cesare PaveseRead
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
Cesare PaveseRead
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.
Cesare PaveseRead
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
Cesare PaveseRead
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
Cesare PaveseRead
Similar quotes
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten.
Milan KunderaRead
Please open your eyes now, but keep attention in the inner energy field of the body as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
Eckhart TolleRead
Remember that you will create peace only when you are peaceful.
Deepak ChopraRead
The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay...
Jacob BronowskiRead
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac AsimovRead
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead