The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.

with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead,

The thing being searched for becomes less real than the real motions of the hands that search – rummaging, picking up, putting down – and that visibly exist, long and white, with exactly five fingers on each.

The only true art is that of construction. But the present-day milieu makes it impossible for constructive qualities to appear in the human spirit. That’s why science developed. Machines are the only things today in which there’s construction; mathematical proofs are the only arguments with a chain of logic.

We get along because we’re strangers at heart.

I don’t trust masters who can’t be elementary.

But in art there is no disillusion, since illusion is accepted from the start.

To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.

Government of the world begins in us. It’s not the sincere who govern the world, but neither is it the insincere; it’s those who create in themselves a real sincerity by artificial and automatic means. This sincerity is what makes them strong, and it outshines the less false sincerity of others. To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

The sound of our steps in unison helped each of us to think without the other, whereas our own solitary steps would have brought the other to mind.

We all know that we die; we all feel that we won’t die. It’s not exactly a desire or hope that brings us this shadowy intuition that death is a misunderstanding; it’s a visceral logic that rejects .....