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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

-Fernando Pessoa

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Through An Experience That

Fernando Pessoa

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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

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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.

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

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

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 Never Meant To Be But A Dreamer.

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

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.

Life Is Whatever We Conceive It To Be.

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.

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.

God Wills, Man Dreams, The Work Is Born.

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.

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.

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.

The Unnatural And The Strange Have A Perfume Of Their Own

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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.

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

...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

Humanitarianism Is Rude.

Humanitarianism

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

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

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 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.

Better To Dream Than To Be.

My Past Is Everything I Failed To Be.

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

Literature Is The Most Agreeable Way Of Ignoring Life.

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

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.

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.

Everything Is Worthwhile If The Soul Is Not Small.

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.

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.

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

Could It Think, The Heart Would Stop Beating.

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

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

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.

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

Everything Interests Me, But Nothing Holds Me.

Book Of Disquiet

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I Realize That I Was All Error And Deviation, That I Never Lived, That I Existed Only In So Far As I Filled Time With Consciousness And Thought.

I'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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Book Of Disquiet

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

I've Never Done Anything But Dream. This, And This Alone, Has Been The Meaning Of My Life. My Only Real Concern Has Been My Inner Life.

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

There’s Enough Metaphysics In Not Thinking About Anything.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

I Don't Believe In The Landscape.

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

Impossible Things

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

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

Unconsciousness

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.

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.

To Be Understood Is To Prostitute Oneself

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

Art Consists In Making Others Feel What We Feel.

Book Of Disquiet

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).

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.

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

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

Nobody Appropriates Novelties As Readily As The Portuguese.

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.

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.

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

Fraternity Has Subtleties.

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

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.

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

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 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 Human Soul Is An Abyss

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.

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

I'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.

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

Life Is Good, But Wine Is Better.

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

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

Tomorrow I Too – This Feeling And Thinking Soul, The Universe I Am To Myself – Yes, Tomorrow I Too Will Be Someone Who No Longer Walks These Streets, Someone Others Will Evoke With A Vague: 'i Wonder What's Become Of Him?” And Everything I Do, Everything I Feel, Everything I Experience, Will Be Just One Less Passer-by On The Daily Streets Of Some City Or Other.

To Think Is To Destroy.

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

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

My Curiosity Sister Of Larks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Carry My Awareness Of Defeat Like A Banner Of Victory.

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 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 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.

Action Men Are The Unvoluntary Slaves Of Wise Men.

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.

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

Wasting Time Has An Esthetics To It.

Solitude Desolates Me; Company Oppresses Me.

Liberty Is The Possibility Of Isolation.

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.

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.

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

I Have At This Moment So Many Fundamental Thoughts, So Many Truly Metaphysical Things To Say, That I Suddenly Get Tired And Decide Not To Write Any More, Not To Think Any More, But To Allow The Fever Of Speaking To Make Me Sleepy, And With My Eyes Closed, Like A Cat, I Play With Everything I Could Have Said.

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

Everything Is Absurd.

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

Art Lies Because It's Social.

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.

My Joy Is As Painful As My Pain.

But I Am Not Perfect In My Way Of Putting Things Because I Lack The Divine Simplicity Of Being Only What I Appear To Be.

I'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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

In Order To Understand, I Destroyed Myself.

Self Destruction

Sailing Is Necessary, Living Is Not Necessary.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

All Beginnings Are Involuntary.

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!

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.

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.

When I Write, I Solemnly Visit Myself.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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