The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

I don’t know if it happens only to me or to everyone who, through civilization, has been born a second time. But for me, and perhaps for other people like me, it seems that what’s artificial has become natural, and what’s natural is now strange. Or rather, it’s not that what’s artificial has become natural; it’s simply that what’s natural has chang

It occurs to me that thinking, feeling and wanting can also be stagnations, on the threshold of a more intimate thinking, a feeling that’s more mine, a will lost somewhere in the labyrinth of who I really am.

1. to express what one feels exactly as it is felt – clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure; confusedly, if confused – and 2) to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law.

Art, which gives me relief from life without relieving me of living, being as monotonous as life itself, only in a different place. Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered.

Although love is a sexual instinct, it’s not with sexual instinct that we love but with the conjecture of some other feeling. And that conjecture is already some other feeling.

We’re drunk on not being anything, and our will is a bucket poured out on to the yard by the listless movement of a passing foot.

What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit.

It was an occasion to be happy. But something weighed on me, some inscrutable yearning, an indefinable and perhaps even noble desire. Perhaps it was just taking me a long time to feel alive. And when I leaned out my high window, looking down at the street I couldn’t see, I suddenly felt like one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning that are t

The constant analysis of our sensations creates a new way of feeling, which seems artificial to those who only analyse with the intellect, and not with sensation itself.