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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.

-Fernando Pessoa

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The Feelings That Hurt

Fernando Pessoa

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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.

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For Who Expects Nothing, All That Comes Is Grateful

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Art Lies Because It's Social.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself

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

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

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).

You Breathe Better When You're Rich.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

My Homeland Is The Portuguese Language.

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

Myth Is The Nothing That Is All.

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

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

Everything Is Theater.

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

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.

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.

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

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

Life Is Good, But Wine Is Better.

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

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

Life Is Whatever We Conceive It To Be.

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

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.

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

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

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.

Yes, Talking To People Makes Me Sleepy.

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.

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.

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

I Don't Believe In The Landscape.

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

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.

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.

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

Liberty Is The Possibility Of Isolation.

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

Property Isn't Theft: It's Nothing.

All Beginnings Are Involuntary.

I Know Nothing And My Heart Aches

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 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.

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

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.

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.

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My Curiosity Sister Of Larks.

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.

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.

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.

There Is No Safe Standard To Tell Man From Animals.

Again I See You, But Me I Don't See!, The Magical Mirror In Which I Saw Myself Has Been Broken, And Only A Piece Of Me I See In Each Fatal Fragment - Only A Piece Of You And Me!

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

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!

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

All I’ve Ever Done Is Dream. That, And Only That, Has Been The Meaning Of My Existence. The Only Thing I’ve Ever Really Cared About Is My Inner Life. My Greatest Griefs Faded To Nothing The Moment I Opened The Window Onto My Inner Self And Lost Myself In Watching. I Never Tried To Be Anything Other Than A Dreamer. I Never Paid Any Attention To People Who Told Me To Go Out And Live. I Belonged Always To Whatever Was Far From Me And To Whatever I Could Never Be. Anything That Was Not Mine, However Base, Always Seemed To Be Full Of Poetry. The Only Thing I Ever Loved Was Pure Nothingness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

My Joy Is As Painful As My Pain.

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

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

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

I Bear The Wounds Of All The Battles I Avoided.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Impossible Things

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Live In The Present

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

Nature Is The Difference Between The Soul And God.

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.

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

Let's Develop Theories, Patiently And Honestly Thinking Them Out, In Order To Promptly Act Against Them – Acting And Justifying Our Actions With New Theories That Condemn Them. Let's Cut A Path In Life And Then Go Immediately Against That Path. Let's Adopt All The Poses And Gestures Of Something We Aren't And Don't Even Wish To Be, And Don't Even Wish To Taken For Being.

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

Each Of Us Is Several, Is Many,is A Profusion Of Selves. So That The Self Who Disdains His Surroundings Is Not The Same As The Self Who Suffers Or Takes Joy In Them. In The Vast Colony Of Our Being There Are Many Species Of People Who Think And Feel In Different Ways. Livro Do Desassossego

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.

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

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.

Blessed Are Those Who Entrust Their Lives To No One.

Blessed Are Those

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

My Past Is Everything I Failed To Be.

Contradiction Is The Essence Of The Universe.

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.

Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Human Soul Is An Abyss

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Humanitarianism Is Rude.

Humanitarianism

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

...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

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.

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.

Literature Is The Most Agreeable Way Of Ignoring Life.

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

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

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

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.

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

Book Of Disquiet

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.

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

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

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.

What Is Art But The Denial Of Life?

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!

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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