MOUNTAIN: Other Quotes by Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet taken from the web "Good Reads"

Other Quotes by Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet

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

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”

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

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”

“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”

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

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”

When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”

“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”

“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”

“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”

“I'm sick of everything, and of the every-thingness of everything.”

“...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”

“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”

“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”