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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.

-Fernando Pessoa

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I've Always Been An

Fernando Pessoa

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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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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

Writing Is Like Paying Myself A Formal Visit.

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

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

Yes, Talking To People Makes Me Sleepy.

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

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

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

My Soul's The Present Shadow Of A Presence Gone.

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.

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

Humanitarianism Is Rude.

Humanitarianism

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.

My Joy Is As Painful As My Pain.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I Don't Believe In The Landscape.

I Know Nothing And My Heart Aches

If We Knew The Truth, We'd See It; All Else Is System And Outskirts.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

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

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.

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

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

My Homeland Is The Portuguese Language.

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

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

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.

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

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.

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.

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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.

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Ser Compreendido é Prostituir-se.

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

Unconsciousness

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.

The End Of Lower Art Is To Please, The End Of Average Art Is To Raise The Top, The End Of Superior Art Is To Free.

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

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!

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

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.

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

Better To Dream Than To Be.

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

Impossible Things

Nobody Appropriates Novelties As Readily As The Portuguese.

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.

Art Lies Because It's Social.

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

Live In The Present

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

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.

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

Book Of Disquiet

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

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.

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.

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

All Beginnings Are Involuntary.

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

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

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

Life Is A Thread That Someone Entangled.

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.

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

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.

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

Could It Think, The Heart Would Stop Beating.

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.

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

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

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.

Every Gesture Is A Revolutionary Act.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

Action Men Are The Unvoluntary Slaves Of Wise Men.

Faithful To The Word Given And The Idea Had.

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

The Inventor Of The Mirror Poisoned The Human Heart.

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

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

Life Is An Experimental Journey Undertaken Involuntarily. It Is A Journey Of The Spirit Through The Material World And, Since It Is The Spirit That Travels, It Is The Spirit That Is Experienced. That Is Why There Exist Contemplative Souls Who Have Lived More Intensely, More Widely, More Tumultuously Than Others Who Have Lived Their Lives Purely Externally. The End Result Is What Matters. What One Felt Was What One Experienced. One Retires To Bed As Wearily From Having Dreamed As From Having Done Hard Physical Labor. One Never Lives So Intensely As When One Has Been Thinking Hard.

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.

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

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

In Order To Understand, I Destroyed Myself.

Self Destruction

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’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.

What Is Art But The Denial Of Life?

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

Property Isn't Theft: It's Nothing.

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.

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.

Strength Without Agility Is A Mere Mass.

Fraternity Has Subtleties.

For Who Expects Nothing, All That Comes Is Grateful

...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

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

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

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

Book Of Disquiet

When I Write, I Solemnly Visit Myself.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

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 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.

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.

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

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!

The Human Soul Is An Abyss

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.

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.

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

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

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

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

What Is A Disease Is Wishing With An Equal Intensity What Is Needed And What Is Desirable, And Suffer For Not Being Perfect As You Would Suffer For Not Having Bread. The Romantic Error Is This Wanting The Moon As If There Was A Way To Get It.

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

Literature Exists Because The World Isn't Enough.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Everything Is Theater.

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.

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

I Never Meant To Be But A Dreamer.

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.

The Unnatural And The Strange Have A Perfume Of Their Own

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.

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

There Is No Safe Standard To Tell Man From Animals.

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

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.

Nature Is The Difference Between The Soul And God.

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

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.

My Boredom With Everything Has Numbed Me.

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 Don't Write In Portuguese. I Write Myself.

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

Solitude Desolates Me; Company Oppresses Me.

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.

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