Kit > Kit's Quotes

“Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The seductiveness of this world and the sign that warrants its transitoriness are one and the same. And rightly so, because only in this way can the world seduce us, and accord with the truth. The grievous thing is that after falling victim to the seduction, we forget the warranty, and so the Good has led us into Evil, the woman's smile has led us into bed with her.”
― Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“It falls lightly, the definite end of this day, on which those who believe and blunder are caught up in their usual work and who, in the midst of their own pain, enjoy the bliss of unconsciousness. It falls lightly, this wave of dying light, the melancholy of the spent evening, the thin mist that enters my heart. It falls lightly, gently, this indefinite lucid blue pallor of the aquatic evening; light, gentle, sad, it falls on the cold and simple earth. It falls lightly, like invisible ashes, a tortured monotony, an active tedium.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“O eyes, my blank eyes,
See the water falling.
Down from the eaves
Falling, always falling.

Down from the eaves
Falling, nearly dying...
O eyes, my blank eyes,
Weary of seeing.

Drown, O blank eyes,
In this whirl of vain sorrow.
Fall and disperse
Like the dying water.”
― Camilo Pessanha, Clepsidra e outros poemas

“Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a ques-tion he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insati-able." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admit-tance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“From the true opponent, a limitless courage flows into you.”
― Franz Kafka

“History adds that before or after he died, he discovered himself standing before God, and said to Him: I, who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself. God's voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“My brain I'll prove the female to my soul; my soul the father: and these two beget a generation of still-breeding thoughts, and these same thoughts people this little world.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plan of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacific's, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!" Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun rise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The weariness of all illusions and of everything that illusions involve — the loss of them, the pointlessness of having them, the anticipatory weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the pain of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing how they would end.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Now, as many times before, I am troubled by my own experience of my feelings, by my anguish simply to be feeling something, my disquiet at simply being here, my nostalgia for something never known, the setting of the sun on all emotions, this fading, in my external consciousness of myself, from yellow into gray sadness.
Who will save me from existence? It isn’t death I want, or life: it’s the other thing that shines at the bottom of all longing like a possible diamond in a cave one cannot reach. It’s the whole weight and pain of this real and impossible universe, of this sky, of this standard borne by some unknown army, of these colors that grow pale in the fictitious air, out of which there emerges in still, electric whiteness the imaginary crescent of the moon, silhouetted by distance and indifference.
The absence of a true God has become the empty corpse of the vast sky and the closed soul. Infinite prison, because you are infinite no one can escape you!”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“The road is endless, there are no shortcuts and no detours, and yet everyone brings to it their own childish haste.”
― Franz Kafka

“He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive.”
― Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“The original sin, the ancient wrong committed by man, consists in the complaint, which man makes and never ceases making, that a wrong has been done to him, that the original sin was once committed upon him.”
― Franz Kafka

“Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it. That is why it is not unfair that a single act of disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; that is why it is not unfair that a single Jew's crucifixion should be enough to save it.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The day is coming; double
your breath, triple
your rancorous goodness
and scorn fear, connections and affectation,
for you, as one can observe in your crotch, the evil one
being aie! immortal,
have dreamed tonight that you were living
on nothing and dying from everything...”
― César Vallejo

“In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I am dying of the incomprehension of those who could have seen me and held me, dying of the emptiness of cautious and clever people, and of the lovelessness of hesitancy and not-much-liking.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“This is a heap of sheer formations:
Here no being is found.

Just as, with an assemblage of parts,
The word "chariot" is used,
So, when the aggregates exist,
There is the convention "a being".

It's only suffering that comes to be,
Suffering that stands and falls away.
Nothing but suffering comes to be,
Nothing but suffering ceases.”
― Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha

“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 what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.
But all of this is apropos of nothing.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Desires are already memories.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.”
― Paul Valéry, Selected Writings

“I began to understand how the continuous struggle for an unattainable perfection finally tires us out, and I understood the great mystics and great ascetics, who recognize life's futility in their soul. What of me would be lost in these written sheets? Before, I would have said "everything." Today, I'd say "nothing," or "not much," or "something strange."
I had become, to myself, an objective reality. But in doing so I couldn't tell if I had found myself or lost myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa