"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."

"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it"

"My past is everything I failed to be."

"There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful."

"I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist."

"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love."

"I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect"

"In order to understand, I destroyed myself."

"I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world."

"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony."

"I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up."

"I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me."

"I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided."

"The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!"

"If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant."

"I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life."

"Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates."

"We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect."

"To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet."

"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."

"To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think."

"I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything."

"Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!"

"But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be."

"I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless."

"The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life."

"Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day."

"Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."

"The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."

"I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am."

"...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad."

"We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky."

"But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?"

"Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me."

"To be understood is to prostitute oneself"

"I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory."

"There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist."

"Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!"

"Every gesture is a revolutionary act."

"Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods."

"And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living."

"I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else."

"My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me."

"Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!"

"At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void."

"Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps."

"Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?"

"The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own"

"What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet"

"I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost."