Fernando Pessoa The Book Of Disquiet Quotes & Sayings

Was it she who saved me from the silent death that characterizes resignation to solitude? — Elie Wiesel

I sing what I sing true. Each night I sing it the way I feel that night. — Ray Charles

Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. — Fernando Pessoa

Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we've felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we've based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn't nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears. — Fernando Pessoa

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul. — Fernando Pessoa

Every moment is going by
part of life is saying goodbye. — Debasish Mridha

No, we don't feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep. — Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn't a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul. — Fernando Pessoa

Good psych should take you to a different place, be a bit disorientating and have the ability to make you wonder and perhaps make you feel the need to sit down. — Simon Price

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it. — Fernando Pessoa

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously. — Jeanette Winterson

No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES — Fernando Pessoa

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything. — Fernando Pessoa

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
From, The Book of Disquiet
— Fernando Pessoa

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. — Fernando Pessoa

My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning. — Fernando Pessoa

Art consists in making others feel what we feel. — Fernando Pessoa

Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! — Fernando Pessoa

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. — Fernando Pessoa

Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. — Fernando Pessoa

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.
The book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa