"For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about whatever unimportant and curious is going on. [...] The supreme honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic. All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things, of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take an interest in others in order to take care of himself."

"I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. [...] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!"

"All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does."

"Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary."

"Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins."

"What would happen to the world if we were human?"

"The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity."

"Everything is absurd."

"For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain."

"If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue."

"We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect."

"And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust."

"If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave."

"Liberty is the possibility of isolation."

"It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering."

"Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman."

"Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious."

"Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect."

"Art lies because it's social."

"Art consists in making others feel what we feel."

"My homeland is the portuguese language."

"If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as."

"My curiosity sister of larks."

"Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major."

"My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?"

"Enthusiasm is rude."

"I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved. [...] I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living."

"To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing."

"Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it."

"What is art but the denial of life?"

"In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation."

"Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming."

"The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere."

"I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague."

"To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived."

"Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men."

"Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination."

"I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me."

"Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine."

"Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious."

"There is no safe standard to tell man from animals."

"Nature is the difference between the soul and God."

"The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man."

"The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified."

"What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them."

"Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches."