I exist unconsciously and I’ll die unwillingly. I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway-house between things, like myself, that are nothing. How disquieting it is to feel, how troubling it is to think, how vain to want!
To narrate is to create, whilst to live is merely to be lived.
Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I do not seek to live, to act or to feel, it is – believe me – so as not to disturb the already laid-down lines of my false persona.
I don’t remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don’t remember.
We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.
I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights.
Life would be unbearable if we made ourselves conscious of it.
Those who think with their reason tend to be distracted. Those who think with their emotions are sleeping. Those who think with their will are dead.
Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn’t belong to it and then dreaming over the result.
Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I’m nobody, absolutely nobody.
I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway house between things, like myself, that are nothing.
Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.
I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer... I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad.
Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.
The truth is, though, that the things we love most, or think we love, only have their full value when we merely dream them.
Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I have been everything, nothing is worth anything.
I weep over a dead life that I carry inside me and never lived.
It offends me that a man can master the Devil, but not the Portuguese language.
Nunca he sabido si mi sensibilidad era excesiva para mi inteligencia, o si mi inteligencia lo era para mi sensibilidad.
For me, life is a somnolence that does not affect the brain. I keep that free as a place in which to be sad.