I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.

Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.

pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]

To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.

God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.

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