“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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
No-one can truly love me because this requires the precondition that a person knows who I am.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from Selected Letters
Friedrich Nietzsche, from Selected Letters
“To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
“There exists a physiological contradiction in the so-called genius: on the one hand he is informed with much wild agitation, and on the other with much purpose in this agitation. As a consequence of this spectacle he is often unhappy, and when he is at his best, he creates because he forgets that he is doing something fantastic and irrational with the highest degree of purpose.”
—Daybreak, §263 (edited excerpt).
—Daybreak, §263 (edited excerpt).
"Noia is plainly an evil: to suffer it is to suffer utter unhappiness. So what is noia? Not a specific sorrow or pain (noia, the idea and nature of it, excludes the presence of any particular sorrow or pain) but simply ordinary life fully felt, lived in, known; it's everywhere, it saturates an individual. Life thus is an affliction; and not living, or being less alive (by living a shorter or less intense life) is a reprieve, or a least a lesser affliction—absolutely preferable, that is, to life."
- Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (1817-1832)
- Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (1817-1832)