The Book Of Disquiet Quotes
"I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why."
"Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
"Retaining from science only its fundamental precept – that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions."
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up."
"I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes."
"All the pent-up bitterness of my life removes, before my sensationless eyes, the suit of natural happiness it wears in the random events that fill up each day."
"… and from the majestic heights of my dreams, I return to being an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon."
"I envy – but I’m not sure that I envy – those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own."
"All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed."
"To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing."
"Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that’s the body."
"I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory."
"The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire."
"It’s noble to be timid, illustrious to fail to act, sublime to be inept at living."
"I’m a well of gestures that haven’t even all been traced in my mind, of words I haven’t even thought to form on my lips, of dreams I forgot to dream to the end."
"I’m physically nauseated by commonplace humanity, which is the only kind there is."
"One of my favourite strolls, on mornings when I dread the banality of the approaching day as if I were dreading jail, is to walk slowly past the still unopened shops and stores, listening to the scraps of conversation that groups of young women or young men, or women with men, let fall – like ironic alms – in the invisible school of my open-air meditation."
"The entire life of the human soul is mere motions in the shadows. We live in a twilight of consciousness, never in accord with whom we are or think we are."
"Like someone on a hill who tries to make out the people in the valley, I look down at myself from on high, and I’m a hazy and confused landscape, along with everything else."
"In these times when an abyss opens up in my soul, the tiniest detail distresses me like a letter of farewell."
"I’m like someone searching at random, not knowing what object he’s looking for nor where it was hidden. We play hide-and-seek with no one."
"I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved."
"How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet!"
"We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known."
"The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife. Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread."
"There’s no pastime like the use of science, or things that smack of science, for futile ends."
"Certain sensations are slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog and prevent us from thinking, from acting, from clearly and simply being."
"The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way."
"To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us."
"To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
"Life hinders the expression of life. If I actually lived a great love, I would never be able to describe it."
"All problems are insoluble. The essence of there being a problem is that there’s no solution."
"Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power."
"To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday."
"Every man of today, unless his moral stature and intellectual level are that of a pygmy or a churl, loves with romantic love when he loves."
"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone."
"I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower."
"The only tragedy is not being able to conceive of ourselves as tragic."
"Separated from their native soil, banished from the path leading back to their homes, forever widowed from the tranquillity of life being the same, your emissaries finally arrived, when you were already dead, at the oceanic end of the Earth."
"I have times of great stagnation. It’s not, as happens to everyone, that I let days and days go by without sending a postcard in response to the urgent letter I received."
"I don’t get indignant, because indignation is for the strong; I’m not resigned, because resignation is for the noble; I don’t hold my peace, because silence is for the great."
"I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself."
"I often wonder what I would be like if, shielded from the winds of fate by the screen of wealth, I’d never been brought by the dutiful hand of my uncle to an office in Lisbon."
"Direct experience is an evasion, or hiding place, for those without any imagination."
"All of life’s unpleasant experiences – when we make fools of ourselves, act thoughtlessly, or lapse in our observance of some virtue – should be regarded as mere external accidents which can’t affect the substance of our soul."
"The burden of feeling! The burden of having to feel!"
"There’s an erudition of acquired knowledge, which is erudition in the narrowest sense, and there’s an erudition of understanding, which we call culture."
"For a long time now I haven’t written. Months have gone by in which I haven’t lived, just endured, between the office and physiology, in an inward stagnation of thinking and feeling."
"The entire day, in all the desolation of its scattered and dull clouds, was filled with the news of revolution."
"Before summer ends and autumn arrives, in the warm interim when the air weighs heavy and the colours dim, the late afternoons wear an almost tangible robe of imitation glory."
"My life’s central tragedy is, like all tragedies, an irony of Fate. I reject real life for being a condemnation; I reject dreaming for being an easy way out."
"After the last rains went south, leaving only the wind that had chased them away, then the gladness of the sure sun returned to the city’s hills."
"If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and publish, I know I’ll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and don’t publish at all."
"Dreaming is the worst of drugs, because it’s the most natural of all."
"We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are."
"On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason."
"The ordinary man, however hard his life may be, at least has the pleasure of not thinking about it."
"To think is to destroy. Thought itself is destroyed in the process of thinking, because to think is to decompose."
"Any change in one’s usual routine is always received by the spirit as a chilly novelty, a slightly uncomfortable pleasure."
"It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved."
"The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead."
"The indefinite hour grows yet a little later in the now less pale and less blue blueness mirrored in the buildings."
"I see us as climates over which storms threaten, before breaking elsewhere."
"I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be."
"A romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy."
"I prefer reality to truth; I prefer life, yes, to the very God who created it."
"We never know when we’re sincere. Perhaps we never are. And even if we’re sincere about something today, tomorrow we may be sincere about its complete opposite."
"To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it – this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can’t live without thinking."
"I have no theories about life. I don’t know or wonder whether it’s good or bad. In my eyes it’s harsh and sad, with delightful dreams interspersed here and there."
"Other people’s lives are of use to me only in my dreams, where I live the life that seems to suit each one."
"Thinking is still a form of acting. Only in sheer reverie, where nothing active intervenes... can total renunciation of action be achieved."
"To stop trying to understand, to stop analysing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field – that is true wisdom."
"When I take a good look at man, I see that he’s as unconscious as a dog or cat."
"Deus est anima brutorum, God is the soul of the beasts."
"The existence of evil cannot be denied, but one can deny that the existence of evil is evil."
"If there’s one thing life grants us for which we should thank the Gods, it’s the gift of not knowing: of not knowing ourselves and of not knowing each other."
"We get along because we’re strangers at heart."
"The life we live is a flexible, fluid misunderstanding, a happy mean between the greatness that doesn’t exist and the happiness that can’t exist."
"All that we do, say, think or feel wears the same mask and the same costume."
"I’ve always felt an almost physical loathing for secret things – intrigues, diplomacy, secret societies, occult sciences."
"Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others."
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation."
"Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities."
"I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry."
"Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality."
"In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest."
"I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one."
"Tedium… To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason… It’s like being possessed by a negative demon."
"Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology."
"The idea of travelling seduces me vicariously, as if it were the perfect idea for seducing someone I’m not."
"When I first came to Lisbon I used to hear, from the apartment above ours, the sound of scales played on a piano."
"Smell is a strange way of seeing. It evokes sentimental scenes, sketched all of a sudden by the subconscious."
"One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers."
"Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being."
"It’s not love but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…"
"Revolutionaries make a crass and grievous error when they distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the masses."
"An opinion is a vulgarity, even when it’s not sincere."
"Your hands are captive doves. Your lips are silent doves."
"Every pleasure is a vice, because to seek pleasure is what everyone does in life."
"We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it."