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"And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit " next to the big bed " the involuntary effort of being."
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Exlpore more Existentialism quotes
"That's the existential problem," Fat said, "based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe's Faust, Part One, where Faust says, 'Im Anfang war das Wort'. He's quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; 'In the beginning was the Word.' Faust says, 'Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat.' In the beginning was the Deed. From this, all existentialism comes."
"What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much."
"It doesn't matter where I go, I don't want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don't want to be there either."
"We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real."
"We exist only to exist."
"The flowing river nonchalantly reminds us of life: flowing relentlessly, flowing purposelessly. Life without purpose."
"Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience--any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict."
"Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all."
"We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad."
"Mesa, adorno de marfil, arcoíris, cebolla, peinado, molusco, Sabbat, violencia, cutícula, melodrama, cuneta, miel, pañuelo... Nada la conmovía. (...) Nada conseguía ser más de lo que era en realidad. Eran solo cosas, prisioneras de su propia esencia."
Explore more quotes by Fernando Pessoa
"Perhaps he still hopes. If there's any justice in the Gods' injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they're impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they're trivial....Every dream is the same dream, for they're all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming."
"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 me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness."
"All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn't be love letters if they were not Ridiculous."
"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."
"I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body."
"That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations.The presence of others - always such an unexpected event for the soul - grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble.I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can't look reality in the eye. The sun itself leaves me feeling discouraged and desolate."
"I'm curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don't see with fixed attention, I don't read with great care, and I don't think with continuity. I'm an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I'm definable as a landscape of resignations."
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."
"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."
"I've witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it's dead, that there's nothing I've wanted - and nothing in which I've placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn't disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn't have and could never have them."
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