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Be pure, not in order to be noble or strong, but to be yourself.
giving value to one’s own suffering gilds it with the golden sun of pride. Great suffering can give us the illusion of being Pain’s Chosen One.
One should have a sense of modesty regarding oneself and understand that in the presence of ourselves we are never alone, we are witness to ourselves, and it is therefore important to act always as we would before a stranger,
To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person’s God-given ability to make mistakes.
there is no more painful longing than the longing for things that never were!
Living off ourselves alone, we diminish ourselves, because the complete man is one who is unaware of himself.
Our forefathers’ crude criticism bequeathed to us the impossibility of being Christians, but left us bereft of all possibility of contentment.
What they destroyed was the very thing that gave society its strength and allowed them to destroy it without even noticing the cracks in the walls.
The pagan idea of the perfect man was the perfection of the man who exists; the Christian idea of the perfect man is the perfection of the man who does not exist; the Buddhist idea of the perfect man is the perfection of no man at all.
What is unhealthy is to want with equal intensity what is necessary and what is desirable, and to suffer as intensely because our life is not perfect as we would if there were no bread.
I quickly saw that, for me, solving a religious problem meant finding a rational solution to an emotional problem.
For the occultist, everything ends in everything; for me, everything begins in everything.
those who dream the possible have a real possibility of experiencing real disappointment.
Only a paltry goal is worth aiming for, because only a paltry goal stands any chance of being achieved.
“You’re being exploited, Soares.” This made me realize that indeed I am; but since it’s the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited, my question would be: is it any worse being exploited by Senhor Vasques and his textile company than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy or the impossible? Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.
I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps too, because even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might just as well lavish it on the smallness of my inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.
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 write down what I feel in order to lower the fever of feeling.
To know nothing about oneself is to live. To know a little about oneself is to think.
When I want to think, I see. When I want to step out of my soul, I stop suddenly, absentmindedly,
The more different someone is from me, the more real they seem, because they depend less upon my subjectivity.
Only those who are unable to think what they feel obey grammatical rules.
We cannot deny the existence of evil, but we can reject the idea that the existence of evil is in itself evil.
yes, the ability to complete something probably provokes more envy in me than anything else.
the major anxieties that distract us from ourselves, but the minor annoyances that can trouble the peace of mind to which we all unwittingly aspire.
And what of the sense of freedom that travel brings?
in my opinion, if that sense of freedom is not in me, then it’s nowhere.
Both objectively and subjectively speaking, I’m sick of myself.
I enjoy using words. Or rather: I enjoy making words work.
Having touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for faulty punctuation.
True wealth is closing one’s eyes and puffing on an expensive cigar.
If there is one thing life gives us, apart from life itself, and for which we must thank the gods, it is the gift of not knowing ourselves: of not knowing ourselves and of not knowing one another.
Tedium … It is suffering without suffering, wanting without will, thinking without reason
Tedium … No one with a god to believe in will ever suffer from tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology.
that’s what tedium is: the loss by the soul of its capacity to delude itself,
Everything that was ours, simply because it was once ours, even those things we merely chanced to live with or see on a daily basis, becomes part of us.
Everything that happens in the world we live in happens in us. Anything that ceases to exist in the world we see around us, ceases to exist in us. Everything that was, assuming we noticed it when it was there, is torn from us when it leaves.
That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us.
The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes something marvelous.
Am I then wise?
The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair; he wouldn’t need to talk to anyone or to know how to read, just how to make use of his five senses and a soul innocent of sadness.
Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to.
Inside the chicken coop from whence he will go to be killed, the cock sings hymns to freedom because they gave him two perches all to himself.
(I always find it hard to admit that anything done collectively can possibly be sincere, since the only truly sentient being is the individual).
Those who really suffer don’t form groups, don’t go around in a gang. Those who suffer suffer alone.
Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom.
A reformer is a man who sees the superficial ills of the world and proposes curing them by making the more deep-seated ills still worse.
in society we don’t know what is healthy and what is sick.
Everything we do, in art and life, is the imperfect copy of what we intended.
as joyful as a good bout of sadness.
I love aphorisms because I have no idea what they mean.
