Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

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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.

Fernando Pessoa
If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

Fernando Pessoa
I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

Fernando Pessoa
Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

Fernando Pessoa
… 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.

Fernando Pessoa
We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect.

Fernando Pessoa
All problems are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be.

Fernando Pessoa
My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?

Fernando Pessoa
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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Fernando Pessoa
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.

Fernando Pessoa
I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.

Fernando Pessoa
I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?

Fernando Pessoa
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

Fernando Pessoa
The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
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!

Fernando Pessoa
It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

Fernando Pessoa
Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity.

Fernando Pessoa
Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Fernando Pessoa
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

Fernando Pessoa
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.

Fernando Pessoa
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Fernando Pessoa
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

Fernando Pessoa
They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.

Fernando Pessoa
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Fernando Pessoa
To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

Fernando Pessoa