"What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought."

"A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside."

"The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax."

"Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities."

"I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?"

"Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul."

"Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one."

"It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living."

"I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner."

"What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it."

"The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races."

"The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn."

"Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy."

"Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me."

"In order to understand, I destroyed myself."

"For I am the size of what I see not my height's size."

"To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers."

"Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being."

"There's a tiredness of abstract intelligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe."

"As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes."

"It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was."

"Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life."

"Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells."

"Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom."

"Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake."

"I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by."

"The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!"

"I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling."

"I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility."

"I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said."

"I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror."

"Fraternity has subtleties."

"We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are."

"The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion."

"A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today."

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

"I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life."

"There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world."

"Strength without agility is a mere mass."

"Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes."

"Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows."

"I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing."

"… And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other."

"Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods."

"Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things."

"He looked about thirty, thin, rather above average height, exaggeratedly bent over when seated but less so when he stood up, dressed with a certain negligence, which was not entirely negligence. On his pale, uninteresting face an air of suffering did not stir interest, although it was difficult to define what kind of suffering that air — it seemed to suggest several kinds: privation, anguish, and a suffering born from the indifference of having suffered a great deal."