There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.
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.
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt’s the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.
Again I see you, But me I don’t see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment – Only a piece of you and me!…
Isn’t joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice
Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.
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 always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
I am nothing.I’ll never be anything.I couldn’t want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it
Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
There’s a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine.
With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.
The poet is a faker / Who’s so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to travel but to reach harbour. We found ourselves on the high seas, with no idea of which port we should be aiming for.
From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I
Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.
At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.
I don’t even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.
Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.
All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn’t be love letters if they were not Ridiculous.
This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.]
No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one’s self
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.
I look at myself but I’m missing. I know myself: it’s not me.
Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?
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.
I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. I’m not sure if I’m not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.
But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?
Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.
If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.
There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.
Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there’s no palace till it’s built.