Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

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There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

Fernando Pessoa
It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Fernando Pessoa
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa
Out of a few misunderstandings with reality we construct beliefs and hopes, and we live on these crusts, which we call bread, just like poor children who play at being happy.

Fernando Pessoa
Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.

Fernando Pessoa
I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

Fernando Pessoa
His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
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!

Fernando Pessoa
Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.

Fernando Pessoa
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.

Fernando Pessoa
Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.

Fernando Pessoa
I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.

Fernando Pessoa
It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

Fernando Pessoa
Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.

Fernando Pessoa
I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa