Will power is only the tensile strength of ones own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce. – Cesare Pavese
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative? – Cesare Pavese
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity. – Cesare Pavese
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man – the one he used to be. – Cesare Pavese
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. – Hannah Arendt