Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet Quotes

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

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

My past is everything I failed to be.

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

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

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.

From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

By day I am nothing, by night I am I.

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.

There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.