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Fernando Pessoa -
The Book of Disquiet
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Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.
Fernando Pessoa
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Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.
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I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
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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.
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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.
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Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.
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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.
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I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.
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The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.
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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.
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Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.
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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.
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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.
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I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.
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Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
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I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.
Fernando Pessoa
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Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.
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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.
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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.
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I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
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I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.
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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
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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.
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One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.
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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Fernando Pessoa
Creative Commons
Born:
June 13, 1888
Died:
November 30, 1935
(aged 47)
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