The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so too, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not to be disturbed – and also because I think that the world doe

I’ve wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine.

I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing.

when I just live in the city and not in the world of nature that includes it.

I sorely grieve over time’s passage. It’s always with exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind, whatever it may be.

If men knew how to meditate on the mystery of life, if they knew how to feel the thousand complexities which spy on the soul in every single detail of action, then they would never act – they wouldn’t even live.

I bowed out of life before it began, for not even in dreams did I find it attractive.

Each of us is a speck of dust that the wind of life lifts up and then drops.

Those of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.