Shatakshi > Shatakshi's Quotes

“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Libro del desasosiego

“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To be understood is to prostitute oneself”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.
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 breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.
If only I could think! If only I could feel!”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

“...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
― Fernando Pessoa

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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, The Book of Disquiet

“In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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, The Book of Disquiet

“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, The Book of Disquiet

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet