Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

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Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.

Fernando Pessoa
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

Fernando Pessoa
We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.

Fernando Pessoa
Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

Fernando Pessoa
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

Fernando Pessoa
I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

Fernando Pessoa
One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

Fernando Pessoa
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

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

Fernando Pessoa
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 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.

Fernando Pessoa
I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Fernando Pessoa
Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

Fernando Pessoa
Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

Fernando Pessoa
Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

Fernando Pessoa
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

Fernando Pessoa