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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.

-Fernando Pessoa

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Man Shouldn’t Be Able

Fernando Pessoa

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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.

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

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

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.

Wasting Time Has An Esthetics To It.

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

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.

Could It Think, The Heart Would Stop Beating.

Faithful To The Word Given And The Idea Had.

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

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

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

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

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

Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

I Never Meant To Be But A Dreamer.

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

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

Life Is A Thread That Someone Entangled.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I Know Nothing And My Heart Aches

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

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

I Know Not What Tomorrow Will Bring.

Funny Famous Last Words

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.

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

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’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.

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

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.

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.

...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

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.

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 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.

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

Liberty Is The Possibility Of Isolation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Literature Is The Most Agreeable Way Of Ignoring Life.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Property Isn't Theft: It's Nothing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

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

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

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

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.

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

You Breathe Better When You're Rich.

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

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.

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.

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.

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

Book Of Disquiet

The Unnatural And The Strange Have A Perfume Of Their Own

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.

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.

My Boredom With Everything Has Numbed Me.

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.

For Who Expects Nothing, All That Comes Is Grateful

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.

Strength Without Agility Is A Mere Mass.

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

There Is No Safe Standard To Tell Man From Animals.

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

Contradiction Is The Essence Of The Universe.

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

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).

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

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

Yes, Talking To People Makes Me Sleepy.

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

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

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

My Past Is Everything I Failed To Be.

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

Nature Is The Difference Between The Soul And God.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I Don't Believe In The Landscape.

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.

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.

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Live In The Present

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

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

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.

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 Curiosity Sister Of Larks.

Writing Is Like Paying Myself A Formal Visit.

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.

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Unconsciousness

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Myth Is The Nothing That Is All.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Humanitarianism Is Rude.

Humanitarianism

The Human Soul Is An Abyss

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

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Multipliquei-me Para Me Sentir.

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!

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