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
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
Interpretation
What this quote means
Travel can be challenging as it pushes you out of your comfort zone and relies on the kindness of others.
This quote by Cesare Pavese highlights the inherent difficulties of traveling. It suggests that travel can be brutal because it disrupts our sense of security and familiarity, forcing us to interact with strangers and adapt to new environments. This process can strip away our comfort zones, challenging us to grow and learn in ways we might not otherwise experience at home.
Themes
TravelComfortStrangersHomeAdaptation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for a travel blog reflecting on the challenges and rewards of exploring new places.
More from Cesare Pavese
All quotes →Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare PaveseRead
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
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Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
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The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.
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For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
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Go at least once a year to a place you've never been before.
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