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A Great Emotion Is Too Selfish ; It Takes Into Itself All The Blood Of The Spirit, And The Congestion Leaves The Hands Too Cold To Write. Three Sorts Of Emotion Produce Great Poetry - Strong But Quick Emotions, Seized Upon For Art As Soon As They Have Passed, But Not Before They Have Passed ; Strong And Deep Emotions In Their Remembrance Along Time After ; And False Emotions, That Is To Say, Emotions Felt In The Intellect. Not Insincerity, But A Translated Sincerity, Is The Basis Of All Art.

-Fernando Pessoa

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A Great Emotion Is

Fernando Pessoa

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A Great Emotion Is Too Selfish ; It Takes Into Itself All The Blood Of The Spirit, And The Congestion Leaves The Hands Too Cold To Write. Three Sorts Of Emotion Produce Great Poetry - Strong But Quick Emotions, Seized Upon For Art As Soon As They Have Passed, But Not Before They Have Passed ; Strong And Deep Emotions In Their Remembrance Along Time After ; And False Emotions, That Is To Say, Emotions Felt In The Intellect. Not Insincerity, But A Translated Sincerity, Is The Basis Of All Art.

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In Order To Understand, I Destroyed Myself.

Self Destruction

Between Me And Life Is A Faint Glass. No Matter How Sharply I See And Understand Life, I Cannot Touch It.

Again I See You, But Me I Don't See!, The Magical Mirror In Which I Saw Myself Has Been Broken, And Only A Piece Of Me I See In Each Fatal Fragment - Only A Piece Of You And Me!

I Asked For Very Little From Life, And Even This Little Was Denied Me. A Nearby Field, A Ray Of Sunlight, A Little Bit Of Calm Along With A Bit Of Bread, Not To Feel Oppressed By The Knowledge That I Exist, Not To Demand Anything From Others, And Not To Have Others Demand Anything From Me - This Was Denied Me, Like The Spare Change We Might Deny A Beggar Not Because We're Mean-hearted But Because We Don't Feel Like Unbuttoning Our Coat.

I've Always Been An Ironic Dreamer, Unfaithful To My Inner Promises. Like A Complete Outsider, A Casual Observer Of Whom I Thought I Was, I've Always Enjoyed Watching My Daydreams Go Down In Defeat. I Was Never Convinced Of What I Believed In. I Filled My Hands With Sand, Called It Gold, And Opened Them Up To Let It Slide Through. Words Were My Only Truth. When The Right Words Were Said, All Was Done; The Rest Was The Sand That Had Always Been.

The Essence Of What I Desire Is Simply This: To Sleep Away Life.

Have You Ever Considered, Beloved Other, How Invisible We Are To Each Other? We Look At Each Other Without Seeing. We Listen To Each Other And Hear Only A Voice Inside Out Self. The Words Of Others Are Mistakes Of Our Hearing, Shipwrecks Of Our Understanding. How Confidently We Believe Our Meanings Of Other People's Words.

The Chill Of What I Won't Feel Gnaws At My Present Heart.

Success Consists In Being Successful, Not In Having Potential For Success. Any Wide Piece Of Ground Is The Potential Site Of A Palace, But There's No Palace Till It's Built.

But Do We Really Live? To Live Without Knowing What Life Is - Is That Living?

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Let Us Sculpt In Hopeless Silence All Our Dreams Of Speaking.

It Is Noble To Be Shy, Illustrious Not To Know How To Act, Great Not To Have A Gift For Living.

There Are Ships Sailing To Many Ports, But Not A Single One Goes Where Life Is Not Painful.

If This Be To Have Sense, If To Be Awake Be But To See This Bright, Great Sleep Of Things, For The Rarer Potion Mine Own Dreams I'll Take And For Truth Commune With Imaginings

If I Had Written King Lear, I Would Regret It All My Life Afterwards. Because That Work Is So Big, That Its Defects Show As Huge, Its Monstrous Defects, Things Even Minimal In Between Some Scenes And Their Possible Perfection. It's Not The Sun With Spots; It's A Broken Greek Statue.

Writing Is Like Paying Myself A Formal Visit.

Changing From The Ghosts Of Faith To The Spectres Of Reason Is Just Changing Cells.

There's Something Vile (and All The More Vile Because Ridiculous) In The Tendency Of Feeble Men To Make Universal Tragedies Out Of The Sad Comedies Of Their Private Woes.

You Breathe Better When You're Rich.

Decadence Is The Total Loss Of Unconsciousness, Which Is The Very Basis Of Life. Could It Think, The Heart Would Stop Beating.

My Boredom With Everything Has Numbed Me.

I Sometimes Think, With A Sad Delight, That If One Day, In A Future I No Longer Belong To, These Sentences, That I Write, Last With Praise, I Will At Last Have The People Who Understand Me, Those Mine, The True Family To Be Born In And Be Loved... I Will Only Be Understood In Effigy, When Affection No Longer Repays The Dead The Unaffection That Was, When Living.

There's A Non-existent Peace In The Uncertain Quietness

Every Man Who Deserves To Be Famous Knows It Is Not Worth The Trouble.

If You Cannot Live Alone, You Were Born A Slave.

To Think Is To Destroy.

What Hells And Purgatories And Heavens I Have Inside Of Me! But Who Sees Me Do Anything That Disagrees With Life--me, So Calm And Peaceful?

I'd Woken Up Early, And I Took A Long Time Getting Ready To Exist.

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

Yes, Talking To People Makes Me Sleepy.

All Of This Passes, And None Of It Means Anything To Me.it's All Foreign To My Fate, And Even To Fate As A Whole. It'sjust Unconsciousness, Curses Of Protest When Chance Hurlsstones, Echoes Of Unknown Voices - A Collectivemishmash Of Life.

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

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To Live Is To Be Someone Else. Feeling Is Impossible If We Feel Today As We Felt Yesterday: To Feel Today The Same Thing We Felt Yesterday Is Not To Feel At All--it's Merely To Remember Today What We Felt Yesterday, Since Today We Are The Living Cadaver Of Yesterday's Lost Life.

All That I've Lived I've Forgotten, As If I'd Vaguely Heard It. All That I'll Be Reminds Me Of Nothing, As If I'd Lived And Forgotten It.

Being Tired Of All Illusions And Of Everything About Illusions – The Loss Of Illusions, The Uselessness Of Having Them, The Prefatigue Of Having To Have Them In Order To Lose Them, The Sadness Of Having Had Them, The Intellectual Shame Of Having Had Them Knowing That They Would Have To End This Way.

Each Of Us Is Several, Is Many,is A Profusion Of Selves. So That The Self Who Disdains His Surroundings Is Not The Same As The Self Who Suffers Or Takes Joy In Them. In The Vast Colony Of Our Being There Are Many Species Of People Who Think And Feel In Different Ways. Livro Do Desassossego

Being A Retired Major Looks Like An Ideal Thing To Me. What A Pity You Couldn't Eternally Have Been Just A Retired Major.

I Am Tired Of Myself In Every Way. All Things, Deep Down To The Secret Of Their Roots, Are Stained By The Color Of My Weariness.

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

There Is No Happiness Without Knowledge. But Knowledge Of Happiness Is Unhappy; For Knowing Ourselves Happy Is Knowing Ourselves Passing Through Happiness, And Having To, Immediatly At Once, Leave It Behind. To Know Is To Kill, In Happiness As In Everything. Not To Know, Though, Is Not To Exist.

Every Day Things Happen In The World That Cannot Be Explained By Any Law Of Things We Know. Every Day They're Mentioned And Forgotten, And The Same Mystery That Brought Them Takes Them Away, Transforming Their Secret Into Oblivion. Such Is The Law By Which Things That Can't Be Explained Must Be Forgotten. The Visible World Goes On As Usual In The Broad Daylight. Otherness Watches Us From The Shadows.

A Being Who, As I Grew Older, Lost Imagination, Emotion, A Type Of Intelligence, A Way Of Feeling Things - All That Which, While It Made Me Sorry, Did Not Horrify Me. But What Am I Experiencing When I Read Myself As If I Were Someone Else? On Which Bank Am I Standing If I See Myself In The Depths?

I Never Go To Where's A Risk. I'm Frightened Of Dangers Down To Boredom.

The Human Soul Is An Abyss

The Poet Is A Pretender. / He Pretends So Completely, / That He Even Pretends That It Is Pain / The Pain He Really Feels.

The Unnatural And The Strange Have A Perfume Of Their Own

I Wasn’t Meant For Reality, But Life Came And Found Me.

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I Don't Believe In The Landscape.

Art Lies Because It's Social.

Civilization Consists In Giving Something An Unfitting Name, Then Dream About The Result. And Indeed The False Name And The Real Dream Create A New Reality. The Object Really Becomes Another, Because We Turned It Into Another One. We Manufacture Realities.

We Almost Always Live Outside Ourselves, And Life Itself Is A Continual Dispersion. But It's Towards Ourselves That We Tend, As Towards A Centre Around Which, Like Planets, We Trace Absurd And Distant Ellipses.

There Are Those That Even God Exploits, And They Are Prophets And Saints In The Vacuousness Of The World.

It's Not Demons (who At Least Have A Human Face) But Hell Itself That Seems To Be Laughing Inside Me, It's The Croaking Madness Of The Dead Universe, The Spinning Cadaver Of Physical Space, The End Of All Worlds Blowing Blackly In The Wind, Formless And Timeless, Without A God Who Created It, Without Even Its Own Self, Impossibly Whirling In The Absolute Darkness As The One And Only Reality, Everything.

I Suffer From Life And From Other People. I Can’t Look At Reality Face To Face. Even The Sun Discourages And Depresses Me. Only At Night And All Alone, Withdrawn, Forgotten And Lost, With No Connection To Anything Real Or Useful — Only Then Do I Find Myself And Feel Comforted.

To Be Great, Be Whole; Exclude Nothing, Exaggerate Nothing That Is Not You. Be Whole In Everything. Put All You Are Into The Smallest Thing You Do. So, In Each Lake, The Moon Shines With Splendor Because It Blooms Up Above.

Ah, What A Morning This Is, Awakening Me To Life's Stupidity. [98 - Zenith Trans.]

Isn't Joyful Or Painful This Pain In Which I Rejoice

What Can I Expect From Myself? My Sensation In All Their Horrible Acuity, And A Profound Awareness Of Feeling. A Sharp Mind That Only Destroys Me, And An Unusual Capacity For Dreaming To Keep Me Entertained. A Dead Will And A Reflection That Cradles It, Like A Living Child. From, The Book Of Disquiet

Myth Is The Nothing That Is All.

To Need To Dominate Others Is To Need Others. The Commander Is Dependent.

I'm Upset By The Happiness Of All These Men Who Don't Know They're Unhappy. Because Of That, Though, I Love Them All. Dear Vegetables!

I'm Astounded Whenever I Finish Something. Astounded And Distressed. My Perfectionist Instinct Should Inhibit Me From Finishing; It Should Inhibit Me From Even Beginning. But I Get Distracted And Start Doing Something. What I Achieve Is Not The Product Of An Act Of My Will But Of My Will's Surrender. I Begin Because I Don't Have The Strength To Think; I Finish Because I Don't Have The Courage To Quit. This Book Is My Cowardice.

Literature Exists Because The World Isn't Enough.

The Abstract Intelligence Produces A Fatigue That's The Worst Of All Fatigues. It Doesn't Weigh On Us Like Bodily Fatigue, Nor Disconcert Like The Fatigue Of Emotional Experience. It's The Weight Of Our Consciousness Of The World, A Shortness Of Breath In Our Soul.

A Great Emotion Is Too Selfish ; It Takes Into Itself All The Blood Of The Spirit, And The Congestion Leaves The Hands Too Cold To Write. Three Sorts Of Emotion Produce Great Poetry - Strong But Quick Emotions, Seized Upon For Art As Soon As They Have Passed, But Not Before They Have Passed ; Strong And Deep Emotions In Their Remembrance Along Time After ; And False Emotions, That Is To Say, Emotions Felt In The Intellect. Not Insincerity, But A Translated Sincerity, Is The Basis Of All Art.

I Take With Me The Conscience Of Defeat As A Victory Banner.

I Asked For Very Little From Life, And Even This Little Was Denied Me.

Nostalgia! I Feel It Even For Someone Who Meant Nothing To Me, Out Of Anxiety For The Flight Of Time And A Sickness Bred Of The Mystery Of Life. If One Of The Faces I Pass Daily On The Streets Disappears, I Feel Sad; Yet They Meant Nothing To Me, Other Than Being A Symbol Of All Life.

I Am The Outskirts Of Some Non-existent Town, The Long-winded Prologue To An Unwritten Book. I'm Nobody, Nobody. I Don't Know How To Feel Or Think Or Love. I'm A Character In A Novel As Yet Unwritten, Hovering In The Air And Undone Before I've Even Existed, Amongst The Dreams Of Someone Who Never Quite Managed To Breath Life Into Me.

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

Once We're Able To See This World As An Illusion And A Phantasm, Then We Can See Everything That Happens To Us As A Dream, As Something That Pretended To Exist While We Were Sleeping. And We Will Become Subtly And Profoundly Indifferent Towards All Of Life's Setbacks And Calamities. Those Who Die Turned A Corner, Which Is Why We've Stopped Seeing Them; Those Who Suffer Pass Before Us Like A Nightmare, If We Feel, Or Like An Unpleasant Daydream, If We Think. And Even Our Own Suffering Won't Be More Than This Nothingness.

I Never Cared About Whatever Tragic Event Happened In China. It's Faraway Decoration, Even If In Blood And Plague.

Wise Is He Who Enjoys The Show Offered By The World.

I Know Nothing And My Heart Aches

There Is A Time When It Is Necessary To Abandon The Used Clothes, Which Already Have The Shape Of Our Body And To Forget Our Paths, Which Takes Us Always To The Same Places. This Is The Time To Cross The River: And If We Don't Dare To Do It, We Will Have Stayed, Forever Beneath Ourselves

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

Book Of Disquiet

La Literatura Es La Manera Más Agradable De Ignorar La Vida.

I Come Closer To My Desk As To A Bulwark Against Life.

I’m Losing My Taste For Everything, Including Even My Taste For Finding Everything Tasteless.

Humanitarianism Is Rude.

Humanitarianism

First Watcher Why Do People Die? Second Watcher Perhaps Because They Don't Dream Enough.

Man Shouldn't Be Able To See His Own Face. That's What's Most Terrible. Nature Gave Him The Possibility Of Not Seeing It, As Well As The Incapacity Of Not Seeing His Own Eyes.

God Gave The Sea The Danger And The Abyss, But It Was In It That He Mirrored The Sky.

Everything Is Absurd.

I Don't Know What I Feel Or What I Want To Feel. I Don't Know What To Think Or What I Am.

I Have At This Moment So Many Fundamental Thoughts, So Many Truly Metaphysical Things To Say, That I Suddenly Get Tired And Decide Not To Write Any More, Not To Think Any More, But To Allow The Fever Of Speaking To Make Me Sleepy, And With My Eyes Closed, Like A Cat, I Play With Everything I Could Have Said.

And, Like The Great Damned Souls, I Shall Always Feel That Thinking Is Worth More Than Living.

We Live By Action—by Acting On Desire. Those Of Us Who Don't Know How To Want—whether Geniuses Or Beggars—are Related By Impotence.

Attention To Detail And A Perfectionist Instinct, Far From Stimulating Action, Are Character Qualities That Lead To Renunciation. Better To Dream Than To Be.

We, All Who Live, Have A Life That Is Lived And Another Life That Is Thought, And The Only Life We Have It's The One That Is Divided In Right Or Wrong.

I Am The Escaped One, After I Was Born They Locked Me Up Inside Me But I Left. My Soul Seeks Me, Through Hills And Valley, I Hope My Soul Never Finds Me.

Sometimes, When I Wake Up At Night, I Feel Invisible Hands Weaving My Destiny.

Pg 9, "the Consciousness Of Life's Unconsciousness Is The Oldest Tax Levied On The Intelligence.

Unconsciousness

We Are Two Abysses - A Well Staring At The Sky.

The Supreme Empire Is That Of The Emperor Who Renounces All Normal Life, That Of Other Men, And In Who The Care Of Supremacy Doesn't Weigh Like A Load Of Jewels.

Wasting Time Has An Esthetics To It.

Let's Absurdify Life, From East To West. Let Us Play Hide-and-seek With Our Consciousness Of Living.

Should I Be What I Think? But I Think About Being So Many Things!

Book Of Disquiet

I Walk Along A Street And See In The Faces Of The Passersby Not The Expression They Really Have But The Expression They Would Have For Me If They Knew About My Life And How I Am, If I Carried, Transparent In My Gestures And My Face, The Ridiculous, Timid Abnormality Of My Soul.

I Enjoy Wording. Words For Me Are Tangible Bodies, Visible Sirens, Incarnate Sensualities.

Third Watcher Let Her Speak. Don't Interrupt. She Knows Words That Mermaids Taught Her...i'm Falling Asleep In Order To Hear Her...go On, Sister, Go On...my Heart Aches Because I Wasn't You When You Dreamed At The Seashore.

Through An Experience That Simultaneously Involved My Sensibility And Intelligence, I Realized Early On That The Imaginative Life, However Morbid It Might Seem, Is The One That Suits Temperaments Like Mine. The Fictions Of My Imagination (as It Later Developed) May Weary Me, But They Don't Hurt Or Humiliate. Impossible Lovers Can't Cheat On Us, Or Smile At Us Falsely, Or Be Calculating In Their Caresses. They Never Forsake Us, And They Don't Die Or Disappear. --the Book Of Disquiet

The Slope Takes You To The Windmill, But Effort Takes You Nowhere.

It's In An Inland Sea That The River Of My Life Ended.

No Intelligent Idea Can Gain General Acceptance Unless Some Stupidity Is Mixed In With It.

What Has Happened To Us Has Happened To Everyone Or Only To Us; If To Everyone, Then It's No Novelty, And If Only To Us, Then It Won't Be Understood.

I’ve Always Wanted To Be Liked. It Grieved Me That I Was Treated With Indifference. Left An Orphan By Fortune, I Wanted—like All Orphans—to Be The Object Of Someone’s Affection. This Need Has Always Been A Hunger That Went Unsatisfied, And So Thoroughly Have I Adapted To This Inevitable Hunger That I Sometimes Wonder If I Really Feel The Need To Eat. Whatever Be The Case, Life Pains Me.

There's No Greater Tragedy Than An Equal Intensity, In The Same Soul Or The Same Man, Of The Intellectual Sentiment And The Moral Sentiment. For A Man To Be Utterly And Absolutely Moral, He Has To Be A Bit Stupid. For A Man To Be Absolutely Intellectual, He Has To Be A Bit Immoral.

Art Gives Us The Illusion Of Liberation From The Sordid Business Of Being.

The Perfect Man Of Pagans Was The Perfection Of The Man There Is; The Perfect Man Of Christians, The Perfection Of The Man There Isn't; The Buddhists' Perfect Man, The Perfection Of Not Existing A Man.

I'd Like To Be In The Country So That I'd Could Like Being In The City.

I Search And Can't Find Myself. I Belong In Chrysanthemum Time, Sharp In Calla Lily Elongations. God Made My Soul Into An Ornamental Thing.

Sadly I Write In My Quiet Room, Alone As I Have Always Been, Alone As I Will Always Be. And I Wonder If My Apparently Negligible Voice Might Not Embody The Essence Of Thousands Of Voices, The Longing For Self Expression Of Thousands Of Lives, The Patience Of Millions Of Souls Resigned Like My Own To Their Daily Lot, Their Useless Dreams, And Their Hopeless Hopes.

Everything Around Me Is Evaporating. My Whole Life, My Memories, My Imagination And Its Contents, My Personality - It's All Evaporating. I Continuously Feel That I Was Someone Else, That I Felt Something Else, That I Thought Something Else. What I'm Attending Here Is A Show With Another Set. And The Show I'm Attending Is Myself.

There's A Tiredness Of Abstract Inteligence, And It's The Most Horrible Of Tirednesses. It Doesn't Weight On You Like The Tiredness Of The Body, Nor Does It Worry You Like The Tiredness Of Knowledge And Emotion. It's A Weightiness Of The Conscience Of The World, An Inability Of The Soul To Breathe.

My Homeland Is The Portuguese Language.

I Think Of Life As An Inn Where I Have To Stay Until The Abyss Coach Arrives. I Don't Know Where It Will Take Me, For I Know Nothing.

I Carry My Awareness Of Defeat Like A Banner Of Victory.

Ser Compreendido é Prostituir-se.

Pg.9 "in My Heart There's A Peaceful Anguish, And My Calm Is Made Of Resignation.

I Am The Suburb Of A Non-existent Town, The Prolix Commentary On A Book Never Written. I Am Nobody, Nobody. I Am A Character In A Novel Which Remains To Be Written, And I Float, Aerial, Scattered Without Ever Having Been, Among The Dreams Of A Creature Who Did Not Know How To Finish Me Off.

The Gods Sell When They Give. Glory Is Paid For With Disgrace. Poor Are The Happy, For They Are Just What Passes.

What Is Art But The Denial Of Life?

Talking To People Makes Me Feel Like Sleeping. Only My Ghostly And Imaginary Friends, Only The Conversations I Have In My Dreams, Are Genuinely Real And Substantial.

Inch By Inch I Conquered The Inner Terrain I Was Born With. Bit By Bit I Reclaimed The Swamp In Which I'd Languished. I Gave Birth To My Infinite Being, But I Had To Wrench Myself Out Of Me With Forceps.

I'm Going To End A Life That I Thought Could Contain Every Kind Of Greatness But That In Fact Consisted Only Of My Incapacity To Really Want To Be Great. Whenever I Arrived At A Certainty, I Remembered That Those With The Greatest Certainties Are Lunatics.

Life Is Whatever We Conceive It To Be.

I Am Nothing. I'll Never Be Anything. I Couldn't Want To Be Something. Apart From That, I Have In Me All The Dreams In The World.

Giving Importance To What We Think Because We Thought It, Taking Our Own Selves Not Only (to Quote The Greek Philosopher) As The Measure Of All Things But As Their Norm Or Standard, We Create In Ourselves, If Not An Interpretation, At Least A Criticism Of The Universe, Which We Don't Even Know And Therefore Cannot Criticize. The Giddiest, Most Weak-minded Of Us Then Promote That Criticism To An Interpretation That's Superimposed, Like A Hallucination; Induced Rather Than Deduced. It's A Hallucination In The Strict Sense, Being An Illusion Based On Something Only Dimly Seen.

I Was A Poet Animated By Philosophy, Not A Philosopher With Poetic Faculties.

The Startling Reality Of Things Is My Discovery Every Single Day.

The House Clock, Place Certain There At The Bottom Of Things, Strikes The Half Hour Dry And Null. All Is So Much, All Is So Deep, All Is So Dark And Cold!

Having Touched Christ's Feet Is Not An Excuse For Punctuation Mistakes.

My Joy Is As Painful As My Pain.

Against Destiny I Fulfilled My Duty. Uselessly? No, For I Fulfilled It.

Everything I Sought In Life I Abandoned For The Sake Of The Search. I'm Like One Who Absentmindedly Looks For He Doesn't Know What, Having Forgotten It In His Dreaming As The Search Got Under Way.

What's Given, In Fact, Always Depends On The Person Or Thing It's Given To. A Minor Incident In The Street Brings The Cook To The Door And Entertains Him More Than I Would Be Entertained By Contemplating The Most Original Idea, By Reading The Greatest Book, Or By Having The Most Gratifying Of Useless Dreams. If Life Is Basically Monotony, He Has Escaped It More Than I. And He Escapes It More Easily Than I. The Truth Isn't With Him Or With Me, Because It Isn't With Anyone, But Happiness Does Belong To Him.

To Have Opinions Is To Sell Out To Youself. To Have No Opinions Is To Exist. To Have Every Opinion Is To Be A Poet.

Book Of Disquiet

Since I Wasn't Able To Leave A Succession Of Beautiful Lies, I Want To Leave The Smidgen Of Truth That The Falsehood Of Everything Lets Us Suppose We Can Tell.

My Happiest Hours Are Those In Which I Think Nothing, Want Nothing, When I Do Not Even Dream, But Lose Myself In Some Spurious Vegetable Torpor, Moss Growing On The Surface Of Life. Without A Trace Of Bitterness I Savour My Absurd Awareness Of Being Nothing, A Mere Foretaste Of Death And Extinction.

I've Reached The Point Where Tedium Is A Person, The Incarnate Fiction Of My Own Company.

Never Read A Book To The End, Nor Even In Sequence And Without Skipping.

...the Painful Intensity Of My Sensations, Even When They're Happy Ones; The Blissful Intensity Of My Sensations, Even When They're Sad.

Book Of Disquiet

We’ve Been Devastated By The Severest And Deadliest Drought In History – That Of Our Profound Awareness Of The Futility Of All Effort And The Vanity Of All Plans.

On The Road Halfway Between Faith And Criticism Stands The Inn Of Reason. Reason Is Faith In What Can Be Understood Without Faith, But It's Still A Faith, Since To Understand Presupposes That There's Something Understandable.

Without Madness What Is Man But A Wholesome Beast, Postponed Corpse That Begets?

Why Is Art Beautiful? Because It's Useless. Why Is Life Ugly? Because It's All Ends And Purposes And Intentions.

The Idea Of Any Social Obligation ... Just The Idea Of It Embarasses My Thoughts For A Day, And Sometimes It's Since The Day Before That I Worry, And Don't Sleep Well, And The Real Affair, When It Happens, Is Absolutely Insignificant And Justifies Nothing; And The Case Repeats Itself And I Never Learn To Learn.

Let's Develop Theories, Patiently And Honestly Thinking Them Out, In Order To Promptly Act Against Them – Acting And Justifying Our Actions With New Theories That Condemn Them. Let's Cut A Path In Life And Then Go Immediately Against That Path. Let's Adopt All The Poses And Gestures Of Something We Aren't And Don't Even Wish To Be, And Don't Even Wish To Taken For Being.

We Never Love Anyone. What We Love Is The Idea We Have Of Someone. It's Our Own Concept—our Own Selves—that We Love.

It's Been Months Since I Last Wrote. I've Lived In A State Of Mental Slumber, Leading The Life Of Someone Else. I've Felt, Very Often, A Vicarious Happiness. I Haven't Existed. I've Been Someone Else. I've Lived Without Thinking.

Your Poems Are Of Interest To Mankind; Your Liver Isn't. Drink Till You Write Well And Feel Sick. Bless Your Poems And Be Damned To You.

The World Belongs To Who Doesn't Feel. The Primary Condition To Be A Practical Man Is The Absence Of Sensitivity.

My Soul Is A Hidden Orchestra; I Know Not What Instruments, What Fiddlestrings And Harps, Drums And Tamboura I Sound And Clash Inside Myself. All I Hear Is The Symphony.

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

And I, Who Timidly Hate Life, Fear Death With Fascination. I Fear This Nothingness That Could Be Something Else, And I Fear It As Nothing And As Something Else Simultaneously, As If Gross Horror And Non-existence Could Coincide There, As If My Coffin Could Entrap The Eternal Breathing Of A Bodily Soul, As If Immortality Could Be Tormented By Confinement. The Idea Of Hell, Which Only A Satanic Soul Could Have Invented Seems To Me To Have Derived From This Sort Of Confusion - A Mixture Of Two Different Fears That Contradict And Contaminate Each Other.

My Curiosity Sister Of Larks.

It's Been A Long Time Since I've Been Me.

The End Is Low, Like All Quantitative Ends, Personal Or Not, And It Can Be Attained And Verified.

Every Spoken Word Double-crosses Us. The Written Word Is The Only Tolerable Form Of Communication, As It Isn't A Stone In A Bridge Between Souls But A Ray Of Light Between Stars.

Fraternity Has Subtleties.

Everyone Has His Vanity, And Each One's Vanity Is His Forgetting That There Are Others With An Equal Soul.

Contradiction Is The Essence Of The Universe.

To Choose Ways Of Not Acting Was Ever The Concern And Scruple Of My Life.

Life Is What We Make Of It. Travel Is The Traveler. What We See Isn't What We See But What We Are.

Book Of Disquiet

To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself

All Beginnings Are Involuntary.

I Will Be What I Want. But I Will Have To Want What I'll Be. Success Is In Having Success, Not Conditions For Success.

Never Having Discovered Qualities In Myself Which Could Attract Someone Else, I Could Never Believe That Anyone Felt Attracted To Me.

To Be Great, Be Whole; Exclude Nothing. Be Whole In Everything.

As I Walk, I Construct Perfect Sentences That I Cannot Remember Later At Home. I Don’t Know If The Ineffable Poetry Of Those Sentences Derived From What They Were Or From Their Never Having Been (written).

For A Long Time Now I Haven't Existed. I'm Utterly Calm. No One Distinguishes Me From Who I Am. I Just Felt Myself Breath As If I'd Done Something New, Or Done It Late. I'm Beginning To Be Conscious Of Being Conscious. Perhaps Tomorrow I Will Wake Up To Myself And Resume The Course Of My Existence. I Don't Know If That Will Make More Happy Or Less. I Don't Know Anything.

I've Always Rejected Being Understood. To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself. I Prefer To Be Taken Seriously For What I'm Not, Remaining Humanly Unknown, With Naturalness And All Due Respect

Book Of Disquiet

If Life Has Given Us No More Than A Prison Cell, Let's At Least Decorate It As Best We Can-with The Shadows Of Our Dreams, Their Colourful Patterns Engraving Our Oblivion On The Static Surface Of The Walls.

My Hapless Peers With Their Lofty Dreams--how I Envy And Despise Them! I'm With The Others, The Even More Hapless, Who Have No-one But Themselves To Whom They Can Tell Their Dreams And Show What Would Be Verses If They Wrote Them. I'm With Those Poor Slobs Who Have No Books To Show, Who Have No Literature Beside Their Own Soul, And Who Are Suffocating To Death Due To The Fact That They Exist Without Having Taken That Mysterious, Transcendental Exam That Makes One Eligible To Live.

The Superiority Of The Dreamer Is That Dreaming Is Much More Practical Than Living, And That The Dreamer Extracts From Life A Much Vaster And Varied Pleasure Than The Action Man. In Better And More Direct Words, The Dreamer Is The Real Action Man.

In Today's Life, The World Belongs Only To The Stupid, The Insensitive And The Agitated. The Right To Live And Triumph Is Now Conquered Almost By The Same Means By Which You Conquer Internment In An Asylum: The Inability To Think, Amorality And Hiperexcitation.

This World Is For Those Who Are Born To Conquer It, Not For Those Who Dream That Are Able To Conquer It, Even If They're Right.

Faithful To The Word Given And The Idea Had.

Whether Or Not They Exist We Are Slaves To Our Gods.

I've Never Done Anything But Dream. This, And This Alone, Has Been The Meaning Of My Life. My Only Real Concern Has Been My Inner Life.

To Know How To Think With Emotions And To Feel With Intellect.

To Have Defined And Sure Opinions, Fixed And Known Instincts, Passions And Character - All That Is The Horror Of Turning Our Soul Into A Fact, Materialize It And Make It External.

When All By Myself, I Can Think Of All Kinds Of Clever Remarks, Quick Comebacks To What No One Said, And Flashes Of Witty Sociability With Nobody. But All Of This Vanishes When I Face Someone In The Flesh: I Lose My Intelligence, I Can No Longer Speak, And After Half An Hour I Just Feel Tired. Talking To People Makes Me Feel Like Sleeping. Only My Ghostly And Imaginary Friends, Only The Conversations I Have In My Dreams, Are Genuinely Real And Substantial.

Nobody Appropriates Novelties As Readily As The Portuguese.

Ah, Who Will Save Me From Existing? It's Neither Death Nor Life That I Want.

I Realize That, While Often Happy And Often Cheerful, I Am Always Sad.

Could It Think, The Heart Would Stop Beating.

Give To Each Emotion A Personality, To Each State Of Mind A Soul.

Today I Suddenly Experienced An Absurd But Quite Valid Sensation. I Realized, In An Intimate Lightning Flash, That I Am No One. No One, Absolutely No One.

All Pleasure Is A Vice, For Seeking Pleasure Is What Everybody Does In Life, And The Only Dark Vice Is Doing What Everybody Does.

All I’ve Ever Done Is Dream. That, And Only That, Has Been The Meaning Of My Existence. The Only Thing I’ve Ever Really Cared About Is My Inner Life. My Greatest Griefs Faded To Nothing The Moment I Opened The Window Onto My Inner Self And Lost Myself In Watching. I Never Tried To Be Anything Other Than A Dreamer. I Never Paid Any Attention To People Who Told Me To Go Out And Live. I Belonged Always To Whatever Was Far From Me And To Whatever I Could Never Be. Anything That Was Not Mine, However Base, Always Seemed To Be Full Of Poetry. The Only Thing I Ever Loved Was Pure Nothingness.

I Had The Same Sensation As When We Watch Someone Sleep. When Asleep We All Become Children Again. Perhaps Because In The State Of Slumber We Can Do No Wrong And Are Unconscious Of Life, The Greatest Criminal And Most Self- Absorbed Egotist Are Holy, By A Natural Magic, As Long As They're Sleeping. For Me There's No Discernible Difference Between Killing A Child And Killing A Sleeping Man.

Look, There's No Metaphysics On Earth But Chocolates.

In The Ordinary Jumble Of My Literary Drawer, I Sometimes Find Texts I Wrote Ten, Fifteen, Or Even More Years Ago. And Many Of Them Seem To Me Written By A Stranger: I Simply Do Not Recognize Myself In Them. There Was A Person Who Wrote Them, And It Was I. I Experienced Them, But It Was In Another Life, From Which I Just Woke Up, As If From Someone Else's Dream.

To Know Nothing About Yourself Is To Live. To Know Yourself Badly Is To Think.

To Create, I Destroyed Myself; I Made Myself External To Such A Degree Within Myself That Within Myself I Do Not Exist Except In An External Fashion. I Am The Living Setting In Which Several Actors Make Entrances, Putting On Several Different Plays.

To Love Is To Tire Of Being Alone; It Is Therefore A Cowardice, A Betrayal Of Ourselves. (it Is Exceedingly Important That We Not Love.)

Our Problem Isn't That We're Individualists. It's That Our Individualism Is Static Rather Than Dynamic. We Value What We Think Rather Than What We Do. We Forget That We Haven't Done, Or Been, What We Thought; That The First Function Of Life Is Action, Just As The First Property Of Things Is Motion.

To Feel Today What One Felt Yesterday Isn't To Feel - It's To Remember Today What Was Felt Yesterday, To Be Today's Living Corpse Of What Yesterday Was Lived And Lost.

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