Life & Wisdom Quote by Cesare Pavese

Pavese turns a dagger of psychological realism on one of modernity's favorite virtues: ambition. The line is structured like a trapdoor. It begins with the grand moral category of "sins" then yanks the reader into something smaller, uglier, and more intimate: inferiority. By relabeling ambition as "otherwise called" inferiority, he doesn’t just insult the striver; he suggests the entire cultural prestige of ambition is a euphemism, a socially approved costume worn by shame.

The specific intent feels less like sermonizing than diagnosis. Pavese isn’t cataloging crimes; he’s tracking motive. "All sins" is rhetorical overreach on purpose: the absolutism forces you to consider how much cruelty, vanity, betrayal, even self-abandonment can be traced to a felt deficit. The subtext is that people rarely do damage from surplus. They do it to climb out of a hole, to stop feeling small, to be seen, to outrun the private courtroom where they’re always the defendant.

Context matters: Pavese wrote in a 20th-century Italy battered by war, ideology, and the hard machinery of status. In a world where identity can be made or broken by class, politics, or artistic legitimacy, ambition becomes both survival strategy and moral alibi. Pavese, a poet haunted by loneliness and self-scrutiny, aims the line inward as much as outward: ambition isn’t a villain from the outside but a symptom from the inside. He gives us a bleak, clean inversion of the self-help myth: the drive to be "more" often begins with the suspicion that you are not enough.