The Book Of Disquiet Quotes & Sayings

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

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever. — Leo Buscaglia

He loved her, and would love her; and defy her, and this miserable bodily pain. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Although my other ambition was to be a musical theater star (and I would attend college on a voice scholarship), writing was never far from my mind. — Alex Flinn

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

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

and she said she might be interested if you had any available . . . — Laurien Berenson

While I thus cogitate in disquiet and perplexity, half submerged in dark waters of a well in an Arabian oasis, I suddenly hear a voice from the background of my memory, the voice of an old Kurdish nomad: If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. Whereupon, as if by magic, all disquiet leaves me. I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'What is the sum total of my life?' somthing in me seems to answer, 'You have set out to exchange one world for another-to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.' And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime. — Muhammad Asad

I think we know too much about actors as it is and their personal lives and it's this information age where we're stimulated constantly by the celebrity buzz effect or whatever it is, these web sites and blogs and different things. — Ryan Reynolds

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

The whole cast of 'Company' was invited to Hal Prince's house. This is one of the highlights of my life. We all sat in the living room. Sitting on the floor, I was right by the piano. — Donna McKechnie

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

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

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

Health can make money, but money cannot make health. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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

A novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. — Virginia Woolf

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

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

Philanthropy without scale and sustainability is like any other bad business that will simply wither and die on the vine. — Naveen Jain

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

When you realize no one else on this earth can be like you ... that no other soul may know the beauty, sorrow, light and darkness you alone are given to see ... then you will, at last, be the fearless individual your Heart of hearts has called you to be. — Guy Finley

- You get more misanthropic every day.
- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper. — Richard Russo

Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward. — Seth Godin

I know being with me is not easy. But I want you to understand no one has me, or has ever had me, except you. — Abbi Glines

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