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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.

-Fernando Pessoa

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For A Long Time

Fernando Pessoa

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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.

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

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.

The Human Soul Is An Abyss

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.

My Boredom With Everything Has Numbed Me.

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.

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.

What Is Art But The Denial Of Life?

There Are Metaphors More Real Than The People Who Walk In The Street.

Only Sterility Is Noble And Dignified. Only Killing What Never Was Is Elevated And Perverse And Absurd.

Fraternity Has Subtleties.

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

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

Unconsciousness

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

Given That We Cannot Know All The Elements In A Problem, We Never Can Solve It.

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

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.

I Know, I Alone I Know, I Alone How Much It Hurts, This Heart With No Faith Nor Law Nor Melody Nor Thought. Only I, Only I And None Of This Can I Say Because Feeling Is Like The Sky - Seen, Nothing In It To See.

My Soul Is Impatient With Itself, As With A Bothersome Child; Its Restlessness Keeps Growing And Is Forever The Same. Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me. I Attend To Everything, Dreaming All The While.

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.

Myth Is The Nothing That Is All.

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

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.

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

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

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

Nature Is The Difference Between The Soul And God.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Should You Ask Me If I'm Happy, I'll Answer That I'm Not.

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.

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

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

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

I Never Meant To Be But A Dreamer.

I Feel Closer Ties And More Intimate Bonds With Certain Characters In Books, With Certain Images I’ve Seen In Engravings, Than With Many Supposedly Real People With The Metaphysical Absurdity Known As ‘flesh And Blood’. In Fact, ‘flesh And Blood’ Describes Them Very Well: They Resemble Cuts Of Meat Laid Out On The Butcher’s Marble Slab, Dead Creatures Bleeding As Though Still Alive.

I Never Had Anyone I Could Call “master”. No Christ Died For Me. No Buddha Showed Me The Right Path. In The Depths Of My Dreams No Apollo Or Athena Appeared To Me To Enlighten My Soul

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

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

I Seek And Don’t Find Myself. I Belong To Chrysanthemum Hours, Neatly Lined Up In Flowerpots.

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

But I Am Not Perfect In My Way Of Putting Things Because I Lack The Divine Simplicity Of Being Only What I Appear To Be.

I’ve Dreamed A Lot. I’m Tired Now From Dreaming But Not Tired Of Dreaming. No One Tires Of Dreaming, Because To Dream Is To Forget, And Forgetting Does Not Weigh On Us, It Is A Dreamless Sleep Throughout Which We Remain Awake. In Dreams I Have Achieved Everything.

I Know Not What Tomorrow Will Bring.

Funny Famous Last Words

As We Wash Our Body So We Should Wash Destiny, Change Life As We Change Clothes.

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.

We May Know That The Work We Continue To Put Off Doing Will Be Bad. Worse, However, Is The Work We Never Do. A Work That’s Finished Is At Least Finished. It May Be Poor, But It Exists, Like The Miserable Plant In The Lone Flowerpot Of My Neighbour Who’s Crippled. That Plant Is Her Happiness, And Sometimes It’s Even Mine. What I Write, Bad As It Is, May Provide Some Hurt Or Sad Soul A Few Moments Of Distraction From Something Worse. That’s Enough For Me, Or It Isn’t Enough, But It Serves Some Purpose, And So It Is With All Of Life.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I Always Live In The Present. The Future I Can't Know. The Past I No Longer Have.

Live In The Present

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

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

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.

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.

To Narrate Is To Create, For Living Is Just Being Lived.

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

Everything Is Absurd.

My Homeland Is The Portuguese Language.

To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself

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.

After The Rains Departed The Skies And Settled On Earth - Clear Skies; Moist Brilliant Earth - Greater Clarity Returned To Life Alone With The Blue Above And Made The World Below Rejoice With The Freshness Of The Recent Rain. It Left Heaven In Our Souls And A Freshness In Our Hearts.

I Look For Myself But Find No One. I Belong To The Chrysanthemum Hour Of Bright Flowers Placed In Tall Vases. I Should Make An Ornament Of My Soul.

Nobody Appropriates Novelties As Readily As The Portuguese.

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

I'm Sick Of Everything, And Of The Everythingness Of Everything.

Book Of Disquiet

Who Am I To Myself? Just A Feeling Of Mine.

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

I Never Was But An Isolated Bon Vivant, Which Is Absurd; Or A Mystic Bon Vivant, Which Is An Impossible Thing.

Impossible Things

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.

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.

The Beauty Of A Naked Body Is Felt Only By The Dressed Races.

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.

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

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

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

To Think Is To Destroy.

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.

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

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.

To Say! To Know How To Say! To Know How To Exist Via The Written Voice And The Intellectual Image! This Is All That Matters In Life; The Rest Is Men And Women, Imagined Loves And Factitious Vanities, The Wiles Of Our Digestion And Forgetfulness, People Squirming — Like Worms When A Rock Is Lifted — Under The Huge Abstract Boulder Of The Meaningless Blue Sky.

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

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.

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!

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

The Unnatural And The Strange Have A Perfume Of Their Own

If I Write What I Feel, It's To Reduce The Fever Of Feeling. What I Confess Is Unimportant, Because Everything Is Unimportant.

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!

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 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.

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

Book Of Disquiet

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.

Tomorrow I Too – This Feeling And Thinking Soul, The Universe I Am To Myself – Yes, Tomorrow I Too Will Be Someone Who No Longer Walks These Streets, Someone Others Will Evoke With A Vague: 'i Wonder What's Become Of Him?” And Everything I Do, Everything I Feel, Everything I Experience, Will Be Just One Less Passer-by On The Daily Streets Of Some City Or Other.

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.

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

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.

I Always Live In The Present. I Don’t Know The Future And No Longer Have The Past. The Former Oppresses Me As The Possibility Of Everything, The Latter As The Reality Of Nothing.

I Don't Mourn The Loss Of My Childhood; I Mourn Because Everything, Including (my) Childhood, Is Lost.

In This Metallic Age Of Barbarians, Only A Relentless Cultivation Of Our Ability To Dream, To Analyse And To Captivate Can Prevent Our Personality From Degenerating Into Nothing Or Else Into A Personality Like All The Rest.

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.

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.

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.

My Past Is Everything I Failed To Be.

Solitude Desolates Me; Company Oppresses Me.

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.

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.

And Leaning Out The Window, Enjoying The Day Above The Varying Volume Of The Entire City, Only One Thought Swells My Soul – The Intimate Will To Die, To Finish, Not To See More Light Over Any City, Not To Think, Not To Feel, To Leave Behind Like Wrapping Paper The Course Of The Sun And The Days, To Rid Myself, At The Edge Of The Grand Bed, As Of A Heavy Suit, Of The Involuntary Effort To Be.

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

Life Is Good, But Wine Is Better.

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.

Life Hurls Us Like A Stone, And We Sail Through The Air Saying, "look At Me Move.

Better To Dream Than To Be.

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

Life Is Whatever We Conceive It To Be.

Literature Is The Most Agreeable Way Of Ignoring Life.

One Never Lives So Intensely As When One Has Been Thinking Hard.

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.

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.

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.

Faithful To The Word Given And The Idea Had.

I Realize That I Was All Error And Deviation, That I Never Lived, That I Existed Only In So Far As I Filled Time With Consciousness And Thought.

Ser Compreendido é Prostituir-se.

In Order To Understand, I Destroyed Myself.

Self Destruction

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.

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

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

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

The Value Of Things Is Not The Time They Last, But The Intensity With Which They Occur. That Is Why There Are Unforgettable Moments And Unique People!

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.

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

Wasting Time Has An Esthetics To It.

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.

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.

In The Very Corner Of My Soul There Is An Altar To A Different God.

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

Book Of Disquiet

Smell Is A Strange Sight. It Evokes Sentimental Landscapes Through A Sudden Sketching Of The Subconscious.

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

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

Book Of Disquiet

Action Men Are The Unvoluntary Slaves Of Wise Men.

There Is No Safe Standard To Tell Man From Animals.

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.

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

That Is My Morality Or My Metaphysics Or Me Myself: A Passer-by In Everything, Even My Own Soul. I Belong To Nothing, I Desire Nothing, I Am Nothing Except An Abstract Centre Of Impersonal Sensations, A Sentient Mirror Fallen From The Wall But Still Turned To Reflect The Diversity Of The World.

The Sea With An End Can Be Greek Or Roman: The Endless Sea Is Portuguese.

Strength Without Agility Is A Mere Mass.

Destiny Gave Me Only Two Things: A Few Accounting Books And The Gift Of Dreaming.

Writing Is Like Paying Myself A Formal Visit.

The Inventor Of The Mirror Poisoned The Human Heart.

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

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.

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

To Kill Our Dream Life Would Be To Kill Ourselves, To Mutilate Our Soul. Dreaming Is The One Thing We Have That's Really Ours, Invulnerably And Inalterably Ours.

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.

Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

And As Well As I Dream, I Reason If I Want, For That's Just Another Kind Of Dream.

Time, Which Grays Hair And Wrinkles Faces, Also Withers Violent Affections, And Much More Quickly.

I Believe That Saying A Thing Is To Keep Its Virtues And Take Away Its Terror.

Friends: Not One. Just A Few Acquaintances Who Imagine They Feel Something For Me And Who Might Be Sorry If A Train Ran Over Me And The Funeral Was On A Rainy Day.

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.

If A Man Can Only Write Well When Drunk, I'll Tell Him: Get Drunk. And If He Tells Me That His Liver Suffers With It, I'll Answer: What's Your Liver? It's A Dead Thing That Lives As Long As You Live, And The Poems You'll Write Will Live Without A As Long As.

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

Direct Experience Is The Evasion, Or Hiding Place Of Those Devoid Of Imagination.

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.

I'm Something That I Used To Be. I'm Never Where I Feel I Am, And If I Seek Myself, I Don't Know Who's Seeking Me. My Boredom With Everything Has Numbed Me. I Feel Banished From My Soul.

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?

Stones In The Road? I Save Every Single One, And One Day I'll Build A Castle.

Yes, Talking To People Makes Me Sleepy.

Contradiction Is The Essence Of The Universe.

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

These Pages Are Not My Confession; They’re My Definition. And I Feel, As I Begin To Write It, That I Can Write It With Some Semblance Of Truth.

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

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.

What's Most Worthless About Dreams Is That Everybody Has Them.

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.

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.

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.

Every Gesture Is A Revolutionary Act.

There's No Regret More Painful Than The Regret Of Things That Never Were.

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

Ah, It's My Longing For Whom I Might Have Been That Distracts And Torments Me!

Book Of Disquiet

To Think Is To Destroy. The Very Process Of Thought Indicates It For The Same Thought, As Thinking Is Decomposing.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If After I Die, People Want To Write My Biography, There Is Nothing Simpler. They Only Need Two Dates: The Date Of My Birth And The Date Of My Death. Between One And Another, Every Day Is Mine.

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

I Read And Am Liberated. I Acquire Objectivity. I Cease Being Myself And So Scattered. And What I Read, Instead Of Being Like A Nearly Invisible Suit That Sometimes Oppresses Me, Is The External World’s Tremendous And Remarkable Clarity, The Sun That Sees Everyone, The Moon That Splotches The Still Earth With Shadows, The Wide Expanses That End In The Sea, The Blackly Solid Trees Whose Tops Greenly Wave, The Steady Peace Of Ponds On Farms, The Terraced Slopes With Their Paths Overgrown By Grape-vines.

Everything Stated Or Expressed By Man Is A Note In The Margin Of A Completely Erased Text. From What's In The Note We Can Extract The Gist Of What Must Have Been In The Text, But There's Always A Doubt, And The Possible Meanings Are Many.

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

At First I Felt Dizzy - Not With The Kind Of Dizziness That Makes The Body Reel But The Kind That's Like A Dead Emptiness In The Brain, An Instinctive Awareness Of The Void.

Multipliquei-me Para Me Sentir.

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Dennis Bergkamp

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