The Book Of Disquiet Quotes

“Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life.”
― 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, The Book of Disquiet

“To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I’ll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Uzaklıklar, Eski Denizler

“The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“„Mi-am cucerit, puţin câte puţin, teritoriul interior care urma să fie al meu. Mi-am cerut, unul după altul, întinsurile de mlaştină în care nu mai rămăsese nimic din mine. Şi am scos la iveală fiinţa mea infinită, dar a trebuit să mă scot pe mine din mine cu forcepsul”. - Fernando Pessoa, "Cartea neliniştirii”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“But there are times in our meditation – and they come to all who meditate – when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen and reseen, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it, whatever we transform it into can only be the substance of meditation. At a certain point we are overwhelmed by a yearning for life, by a desire to know without the intellect, to meditate with only our senses, to think in a tactile or sensory mode, from inside the object of our thought, as if it were a sponge and we were water.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we’ve felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we’ve based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn’t nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that's both excessive and uncomfortable. While it's true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we're not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we're like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it's here that I meet others.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“And the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it.
I take comfort in these reflections, since I can't take comfort in life.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“O night in which the stars feign light, O night that alone is the size of the Universe, make me, body and soul, part of your body, so that – being mere darkness – I’ll lose myself and become night as well, without any dreams as stars within me, nor a hoped-for sun shining with the future.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“No, we don’t feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Ndjeshmënia jeme ndaj të resë asht e tmerrshme: ndjehem i qetë vetëm në vendet ku kam qenë ma parë.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Një njeri, në zotëroftë dijen e vërtetë mund ta shijojë krejt spektaklin e botës ulun mbi një karrige, pa ditë me lexue, pa folë me askënd, veç me anë të përdorimit të shqisave dhe faktit që shpirti të mos dijë me qenë i trishtë.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Për njeriun e zakonshëm me ndie domethanë me jetue, e me mendue domethanë me dijtë me jetue. Për mue, me mendue asht me jetue, e me ndie s’asht veçse ushqimi i të menduemit.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The ego itself, the I in each one of us, is perhaps a divine dimension.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The useless is beautiful because it is less real than the useful, which enjoys a continuing and lasting existence; while the marvellously useless, the gloriously infinitesimal, remains where it is, never goes beyond being what it is, and lives free and independent. The useless and the futile create intervals of humble aesthetic in our real lives. The mere insignificant existence of a pin stuck in a piece of ribbon provokes in my soul all manner of dreams and wondrous delights! I pity those who do not recognize the importance of such things!”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“However much my soul may be descended from the Romantics, I can find no peace of mind except in reading classical authors. The very sparseness by which their clarity is expressed comforts me in some strange way. From them I get a joyful sense of expansive life that contemplates large open spaces without actually travelling through them. Even the pagan gods take a rest from the unknown.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“force without finesse is mere mass”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The tilted urn of twilight pours out on us an oil in which the hours, like rose petals, separately float.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Para viajar basta existir.”
― Fernando Pessoa