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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.

-Fernando Pessoa

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Life Is An Experimental

Fernando Pessoa

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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.

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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’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.

Every Gesture Is A Revolutionary Act.

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.

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.

Myth Is The Nothing That Is All.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Writing Is Like Paying Myself A Formal Visit.

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

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

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.

Everything Is Theater.

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

You Breathe Better When You're Rich.

Faithful To The Word Given And The Idea Had.

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

When One Of My Japanese Teacups Is Broken, I Imagine That The Real Cause Was Not The Careless Hand Of A Maid But The Anxieties Of The Figures Inhabiting The Curves Of That Porcelain. Their Grim Decision To Commit Suicide Doesn't Shock Me: They Used The Maid As One Of Us Might Use A Gun.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Contradiction Is The Essence Of The Universe.

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.

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

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.

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

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

To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

Strength Without Agility Is A Mere Mass.

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

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

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

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

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

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

My Joy Is As Painful As My Pain.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

...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

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

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.

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.

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

Property Isn't Theft: It's Nothing.

I Look At Myself But I'm Missing. I Know Myself: It’s Not Me.

And I Have The Others In Me. Even When I’m Far Away From Them, I Am Forced To Live With Them. Even When I’m All Alone, Crowds Surround Me. I Have No Place To Flee To, Unless I Were To Flee From Myself.

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

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

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.

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

I Don't Write In Portuguese. I Write Myself.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

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

My Past Is Everything I Failed To Be.

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.

I Know Nothing And My Heart Aches

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

There Is No Safe Standard To Tell Man From Animals.

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.

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.

Life Is Full Of Paradoxes, As Roses Are Of Thorns.

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

Book Of Disquiet

Yes, Talking To People Makes Me Sleepy.

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

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.

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

When I Write, I Solemnly Visit Myself.

In Order To Understand, I Destroyed Myself.

Self Destruction

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

Fraternity Has Subtleties.

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

Humanitarianism Is Rude.

Humanitarianism

The Human Soul Is An Abyss

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.

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.

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

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

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 Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

My Dreams Are A Stupid Refuge, Like An Umbrella Against A Thunderbolt.

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

Impossible Things

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

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

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.

Ser Compreendido é Prostituir-se.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

The Unnatural And The Strange Have A Perfume Of Their Own

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.

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.

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

Liberty Is The Possibility Of Isolation.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Live In The Present

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

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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

My Boredom With Everything Has Numbed Me.

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.

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.

Literature Is The Most Agreeable Way Of Ignoring Life.

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

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

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.

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

I Know Not What Tomorrow Will Bring.

Funny Famous Last Words

Art Lies Because It's Social.

What Is Art But The Denial Of Life?

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.

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

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

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.

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 Soul's The Present Shadow Of A Presence Gone.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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