The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

Whether or not they exist, we’re slaves to the gods.

The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

Literature – which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality – seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive,

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

The ultimate man exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and Romanticism is merely the turning inside out of the empire we normally carry around inside us.

The consciousness of life’s unconsciousness is the greatest torment inflicted on intelligence.

The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer is superior because dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.