Fernando Pessoa

The book of disquiet

Roel Christian Yambao

Lexi D

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.

Stella Meier

Happy the makers of pessimistic systems! Not only do they take comfort in having made something, they take pleasure in things explicable and feel part of universal suffering. I do not complain about the world. I do not protest in the name of the universe. I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, butI don't know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer. Why should I care if this is true or not? I suffer, possibly deservedly. (A doe pursued.) I am not a pessinmist, I am merely sad. 

Annie Millman

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.

Noreen Farsai

I am no pessimist. Happy are those who can make of their suffering something universal. 

What kills the dreamer is not living while he dreams; what wounds the man of action is not dreaming while he lives. 

Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless. Why is life ugly? Because it is all aims and purposes and intentions. All its roads are intended to go from A to B. If only we could be given a road built between a place that no one ever leaves and another that no one ever goes to! If only someone were to dedicate their life to building a road beginning in the middle of a field and ending in the middle of another, and which, is extended, would be useful but which remained sublimely, simply, the middle of a road.

“I don’t even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the suffering of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain. Ah, but this makes me suffer more… 

Because to value one’s own suffering is to gild it with the sun of pride.

 Intense suffering can give the sufferer the illusion of being the Chosen One of Pain. Thus…”

"I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it"

"In the day's limpid perfection, the sun-filled air nevertheless stagnantes. It's not the present pressure of the future storm, not a malaise in our involuntary bodies, not a vague haziness in the truly blue sky. It's the lethargy that the thought of not working makes us feel, a feather tickling our dozing face. It's sultry but it's summer. The countryside appeals even to those who don't like it."

The book of disquiet quotes

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