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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.

-Fernando Pessoa

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I'm Something That I

Fernando Pessoa

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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.

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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.

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

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

I Know Nothing And My Heart Aches

To Think Is To Destroy.

My Joy Is As Painful As My Pain.

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

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

Ser Compreendido é Prostituir-se.

To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself

There Are No Norms. All People Are Exceptions To A Rule That Doesn’t Exist.

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

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

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

Faithful To The Word Given And The Idea Had.

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

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

Oh Salty Sea, How Much Of Your Salt Is Tears From Portugal?

Life Is Whatever We Conceive It To Be.

Nobody Appropriates Novelties As Readily As The Portuguese.

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

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

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

Life Is A Thread That Someone Entangled.

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.

I Never Meant To Be But A Dreamer.

We Worship Perfection Because We Can't Have It; If We Had It, We Would Reject It. Perfection Is Inhuman, Because Humanity Is Imperfect.

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

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

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

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

Lord, May The Pain Be Ours, And The Weakness That It Brings, But At Least Give Us The Strength, Of Not Showing It To Anyone!

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 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.

Could It Think, The Heart Would Stop Beating.

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

Silence Emerges From The Sound Of Rain And Spreads In A Crescendo Of Gray Monotony Over The Narrow Street I Contemplate. I’m Sleeping While Awake, Standing By The Window, Leaning Against It As Against Everything. I Search In Myself For The Sensations I Feel Before These Falling Threads Of Darkly Luminous Water That Stand Out From The Grimy Building Facades And Especially From The Open Windows. And I Don’t Know What I Feel Or What I Want To Feel. I Don’t Know What To Think Or Where I Am.

To Live Strikes Me As A Metaphysical Mistake Of Matter, A Dereliction Of Inaction.

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.

I'm A Man For Whom The Outside World Is An Inner Reality.

The Principle Tragedy Of My Life Is, Like All Tragedies, An Irony Of Destiny. I Reject Real Life As If It Were A Condemnation; I Reject Dreams As If They Were An Ignoble Liberation. [...]after The End Of The Stars Uselessly Whitened In The Morning Sky And The Breeze Became Less Cold In The Barely Orange Tinged In The Yellow Of The Light On The Scattered Low Clouds, I, Who Hadn't Slept, Could Finally, Slowly Raise My Body, Exhausted From Nothing From The Bed From Which I Had Thought The Universe.

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

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.

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.

If, On Thinking This, I Look Up To See If Reality Can Quench My Thirst, I See Inexpressive Facades, Inexpressive Faces, Inexpressive Gestures. Stones, Bodies, Ideas - All Dead. All Movements Are One Great Standstill. Nothing Means Anything To Me, Not Because It's Unfamiliar But Because I Don't Know What It Is. The World Has Slipped Away. And In The Bottom Of My Soul - As The Only Reality Of This Moment - There's An Intense And Invisible Grief, A Sadness Like The Sound Of Someone Crying In A Dark Room.

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

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.

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

The Feelings That Hurt Most, The Emotions That Sting Most, Are Those That Are Absurd - The Longing For Impossible Things, Precisely Because They Are Impossible; Nostalgia For What Never Was; The Desire For What Could Have Been; Regret Over Not Being Someone Else; Dissatisfaction With The World’s Existence. All These Half-tones Of The Soul’s Consciousness Create In Us A Painful Landscape, An Eternal Sunset Of What We Are.

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.

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.

Art Lies Because It's Social.

The Inventor Of The Mirror Poisoned The Human Heart.

I Don't Believe In The Landscape.

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

I Want To Be A Work Of Art, At Least In My Soul, Since I Can’t Be One In My Body.

In Any Spirit That Isn't Deformed There Is The Belief In God. In Any Spirit That Is Not Deformed There Isn't The Belief In A Particular God.

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

I'm The Empty Stage Where Various Actors Act Out Various Plays.

Literature Is The Most Agreeable Way Of Ignoring Life.

Myth Is The Nothing That Is All.

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

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

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

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 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

Walking On These Streets, Until The Night Falls, My Life Feels To Me Like The Life They Have. By Day They’re Full Of Meaningless Activity; By Night, They’re Full Of Meaningless Lack Of It. By Day I Am Nothing, And By Night I Am I. There Is No Difference Between Me And These Streets, Save They Being Streets And I A Soul, Which Perhaps Is Irrelevant When We Consider The Essence Of Things

I Crave Time In All Its Duration, And I Want To Be Myself Unconditionally.

And Let Our Despite Go To Those Who Work And Fight And Our Hate To Those Who Hope And Trust.

For Who Expects Nothing, All That Comes Is Grateful

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

But My Sadness Is Comforting Because It’s Right And Natural And Because It’s What The Soul Should Feel When It Already Thinks It Exists And The Hand Pick Flowers And The Soul Takes No Notice.

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

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

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

Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

Property Isn't Theft: It's Nothing.

In Order To Understand, I Destroyed Myself.

Self Destruction

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Sometimes Think That I Enjoy Suffering. But The Truth Is I Would Prefer Something Else.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When I Write, I Solemnly Visit Myself.

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.

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.

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

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

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

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

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.

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.

All Beginnings Are Involuntary.

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

I Know Not What Tomorrow Will Bring.

Funny Famous Last Words

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.

Contradiction Is The Essence Of The Universe.

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

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

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

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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

Writing Is Like Paying Myself A Formal Visit.

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.

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.

I Pass Times, I Pass Silences, Formless Worlds Pass Me By.

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

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.

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.

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

There Is No Safe Standard To Tell Man From Animals.

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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.

For I Am The Size Of What I See / Not My Height's Size.

For Valuing Your Own Suffering Sets On It The Gold Of A Sun Of Pride. Suffering A Lot Can Originate The Illusion Of Being The Chosen Of Pain.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.)

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

Action Men Are The Unvoluntary Slaves Of Wise Men.

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

Whenever Someone Tells Me He Dreamed, I Wonder If He Realizes That He Has Never Done Anything But Dream.

Literature Exists Because The World Isn't Enough.

One Or Another Man, Liberated Or Cursed, Suddenly Sees-but Even This Man Sees Rarely-that All We Are Is What We Aren't, That We Fool Ourselves About What's True And Are Wrong About What We Conclude Is Right. And This Man, Who In A Flash Sees The Universe Naked, Creates A Philosophy Or Dreams Up A Religion; And The Philosophy Spreads And The Religion Propagates, And Those Who Believe In The Philosophy Begin To Wear It As A Suit They Don't See, And Those Who Believe In The Religion Put It On As A Mask They Soon Forget.

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

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

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.

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

We All Have Two Lives: The True, The One We Dreamed Of In Childhood And Go On Dreaming Of As Adults In A Substratum Of Mist; The False, The One We Love When We Live With Others, The Practical, The Useful, The One We End Up By Being Put In A Coffin.

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

I Belong To A Generation - Assuming That This Generation Includes Others Besides Me - That Lost Its Faith In The Gods Of The Old Religions As Well As In The Gods Of Modern Nonreligions. I Reject Jehova As I Reject Humanity.

This Generation

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.

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

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

Book Of Disquiet

I’m Beginning To Know Myself. I Don’t Exist. I’m The Space Between What I’d Like To Be And What Others Made Of Me. Just Let Me Be At Ease And All By Myself In My Room.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 Feel As If I'm Always On The Verge Of Waking Up.

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.

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.

Man Shouldn’t Be Able To See His Own Face – There’s Nothing More Sinister. Nature Gave Him The Gift Of Not Being Able To See It, And Of Not Being Able To Stare Into His Own Eyes. Only In The Water Of Rivers And Ponds Could He Look At His Face. And The Very Posture He Had To Assume Was Symbolic. He Had To Bend Over, Stoop Down, To Commit The Ignominy Of Beholding Himself. The Inventor Of The Mirror Poisoned The Human Heart.

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

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

Book Of Disquiet

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

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

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

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

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.

Strength Without Agility Is A Mere Mass.

Let's Buy Books So As Not To Read Them; Let's Go To Concerts Without Caring To Hear The Music Or See Who's There; Let's Take Long Walks Because We're Sick Of Walking; And Let's Spend Whole Days In The Country, Just Because It Bores Us.

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

Nature Is The Difference Between The Soul And God.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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