The Book Of Disquiet Quotes

#1. No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES

Fernando Pessoa

#2. What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

#3. Men must either be caressed or else destroyed.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#4. Anything can be a weapon, if the man or woman who holds it has the nerve and will to make it so.

Robert Jordan

#5. Talk about polygamy! There is no true philosopher on the face of the earth but what will admit that such a system, properly carried out according to the order of heaven, is far superior to monogamy for the raising of healthy, robust children!

Brigham Young

#6. Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

Fernando Pessoa

#7. The surfer screamed something about bad mushrooms and paddled away from us as fast as he could.

Rick Riordan

#8. Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!

Fernando Pessoa

#9. One day soon you will meet a man, and he will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, and it is my greatest hope that he will not give you syphilis.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#10. Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life.

Fernando Pessoa

#11. Genius is a good deal like the sea ... Nothing can restrain its tide or quicken it.

Inez Haynes Irwin

#12. No, we don't feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep.

Fernando Pessoa

#13. To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it.

Fernando Pessoa

#14. With our love, we could save the world.

George Harrison

#15. Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices.

Fernando Pessoa

#16. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Preeti Shenoy

#17. You might find it fade, but its just another shade ...

Mayank Sharma

#18. Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.

Seth Godin

#19. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Fernando Pessoa

#20. Divorce is a fire exit. When a house is burning, it doesn't matter who set the fire. If there is no fire exit, everyone in the house will be burned!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#21. The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

Fernando Pessoa

#22. Men have the illusion of having a duty to make the world spin properly, which is precisely what makes it wobble.

Vernon Howard

#23. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. 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, always seemed to be full of poetry.

Fernando Pessoa

#24. I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs. Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours.

Sue Townsend

#25. To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

Hubert H. Humphrey

#26. My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.

Fernando Pessoa

#27. I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.

Fernando Pessoa