The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

by Fernando Pessoa

I am no pessimist. Happy are those who can make of their suffering something universal.

To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person’s God-given ability to make mistakes. Furthermore, other people’s actions should retain the advantage of not being ours.

For any mind of a scientific bent, seeing more in something than is actually there is, in fact, to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.

To speak is to show too much consideration for others. The fish and Oscar Wilde both died by the mouth.

Everything that man pronounces or expresses is a marginal note in a text that has been totally erased. From the meaning of the note, we can more or less work out the meaning of that vanished text, but there is always a doubt, and many possible meanings.

Because men only learn in order to teach their great-grandfathers who died long ago. We are only able to teach the real rules of life to those already dead.

History rejects certainty. There are orderly times when everything is wretched, and disorderly times when everything is sublime. Decadent times can be intellectually fertile, and authoritarian times fertile only in feeblemindedness. Everything intermingles and intersects, and the only truth that exists is in one’s imagination.

Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper.

There is no clearer indicator of poverty of spirit than a person’s inability to be funny except at other people’s expense.

What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter, it will be incomprehensible.

I always thought of metaphysics as a prolonged form of latent madness.

Looking at something differently each time means renewing it and multiplying it. That is why the contemplative soul who never left his village nevertheless has at his disposal the entire universe.

To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday’s lost life.

Life for us is whatever we imagine it to be. To the peasant with his one field, that field is everything, it is an empire. To Caesar with his vast empire which still feels cramped, that empire is a field. The poor man has an empire; the great man only a field. The truth is that we possess nothing but our own sensations; it is on them, then, and not on what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.

All literature consists of an effort to make life real.

To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.

However hard his life may be, the ordinary man does at least have the pleasure of not thinking.

To think is to destroy. Thought itself is destroyed by the very process of thinking, because to think is to de-compose.

I am as capable as anyone of love and hate, of fear and enthusiasm, but neither my love nor my hate, neither my fear nor my enthusiasm, is exactly what it seems.

Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality.

The nocturnal glory of being great while being nothing!

I will disappear into the mist, a foreigner to all things, a human island detached from the dream of the sea, a superfluous ship floating on the surface of everything.

Praça da Figueira, replete with goods of various colors, fills with customers and peoples my horizon with vendors of all kinds. I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel. What’s become of the living?

Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradores. Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.

There is nothing real in life that isn’t more real for being beautifully described. Small-minded critics often point out that such and such a poem, for all its generous rhythms, is saying nothing more profound than: it’s a nice day. But it’s not easy to say it’s a nice day, and the nice day itself passes. Our duty, then, is to preserve that nice day in endless, flowering memory and garland with new flowers and new stars the fields and skies of the empty, transient external world.

I do not believe that history, and its great faded panorama, is any more than a constant flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of absentminded witnesses. We are all novelists and we narrate what we see, because, like everything else, seeing is a complex matter.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit. I have special rooms, recalled in the interstices of the imagination by someone else, where I enjoy myself analyzing what I do not feel and peer at myself as at a painting hung in the shadows.

We live almost entirely outside ourselves, and life itself is a perpetual dispersion. However, we are nonetheless drawn back to ourselves as if to a center around which we orbit, like the planets, tracing absurd, distant ellipses.

There is an erudition of knowledge, which is what we usually mean by “erudition,” and there is an erudition of understanding, which is what we call “culture.” But there is also an erudition of sensibility.

We are eternal travelers of ourselves, and the only landscape that exists is what we are. We possess nothing, because we do not even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hands will I reach out to what universe? The universe is not mine: it is me.

Just as some people work because they’re bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say.

What distinguishes the superior man from the inferior man and from the latter’s animal brothers is the simple quality of irony. Irony is the first indication that consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the stage reached by Socrates when he said “I only know that I know nothing,” and the stage reached by Sanches,xii when he said “I do not even know that I know nothing.”

Was I lying? No, I simply understood. Because a lie — apart from the childish, spontaneous lie born of a desire to dream — is merely a recognition that other people exist and an acknowledgement of the need to shape that existence to our own, which cannot be shaped to theirs. A lie is simply the ideal language of the soul, for just as we use words — which are sounds articulated in an absurd manner — to translate into real language the most intimate and subtle movements of emotion and thought, which words alone could never translate, so we make use of lies and fictions in order to understand and get along with other people, which we would never be able to do with our own very personal and untransmittable truth.

Art lies because it is a social thing. And there are only two great forms of art — one is addressed to our deep soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second the novel.

I am the outskirts of some nonexistent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I am 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, among the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

And I, I myself, am the center 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 center 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 center of everything surrounded by the great nothing.

What I find most shocking about those teachers and connoisseurs of the invisible is that, when they write about and describe their mysteries, they write really badly. It offends me that a man can master the Devil, but not the Portuguese language.

What we dream is what we really are, everything else, because of the simple fact that it exists, belongs to the world and to everyone else.

Metaphysics, which should be the supreme guide since it alone concerns itself with the supreme aims of truth and life, is not a scientific theory, but a pile of bricks, out of which, depending on who is doing the bricklaying, spring shapeless houses with no mortar holding them together.

And, like a diverse but compact multitude, this whole world of mine, composed as it is of different people, projects but a single shadow, that of this calm figure writing on Borges’s high desk, where I have come to find the blotter he borrowed from me.