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
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.
Interpretation
Choosing to endure hardship can empower us against suffering.
This quote by Cesare Pavese suggests that by voluntarily accepting and confronting our suffering, we can reclaim our power over it. It posits that those who can endure hardship fully have an advantage, as they can turn their struggles into a form of personal agency, transforming suffering into a choice rather than an uncontrollable force. This perspective offers a complex view on the relationship between suffering, acceptance, and the human experience.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience and strength.
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.
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
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.
It is on great occasions only, and after time has been given for cool and deliberate reflection, that the real voice of the people can be known.
May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants-while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.
My thoughts are whirled like a potter's wheel; I know not where I am nor what I do.
I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
An hour's history of two minds is well told in a game of chess.
It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.