The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

deepest in the soul – a concrete, visible representation that would even be possible, if human possibility depended on something besides Fate.

One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is. Civilization is an education in nature. Artificiality is the path for appreciating what’s natural.

To understand, I destroyed myself.

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

Perhaps it was just taking me a long time to feel alive.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up.

Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.