“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 experien...”
Work
The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa's greatest literary achievement. An "autobiography" or "diary" containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa's death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa's entire writing life. --
Quotes
Showing 1-10 of 10
Fernando Pessoa
Canonical work source
“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 experien...”
“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.”
“I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base,...”
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recogniz...”
“My past is everything I failed to be.”
“Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's alw...”
“To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious...”
“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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no...”