"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."

"Oh Portugal, today you are fog... The Hour has come!"

"These are Fortunate Islands, These are lands without a place"

"Pity him who lives at home Happy with his life, Without a dream, a flexing of wings, To make him relinquish Even the warmest ember of his hearth!Pity him who is happy! He lives because life lasts. Nothing within him whispers More than the primeval law: That life leads to the grave."

"God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky."

"Who wants to go beyond the Bojador Must go beyond pain."

"Was it worthwhile? Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small."

"Oh salty sea, how much of your salt are tears of Portugal!"

"Here lies, on the small farthest beach, the Captain of the End."

"The blighter that is at the end of the sea On the pitch-black night raised itself flying; Round the vessel it flew three times, Three times it flew creaking, And said, 'Who dared pierce Into my dens that I do not reveal, My black ceilings of the end of the world?' And the helmsman said, trembling, 'His Majesty King John the Second!Whose sails are these then which I rub against? Whose the keels I see and hear?' Said the blighter, and rolled three times, Three times it rolled filthy and bulky, 'Who attempts what is solely my power, I who abide where no one ever could see me And who drip the fears of the depthless sea?' And the helmsman trembled, and said, 'His Majesty King John the Second!'Three times he raised his hands from the helm, Three times he had them rooted on the helm, And said after trembling three times, 'Here at the helm I am more than myself: I am a People who wants the sea that is yours; And more than the blighter, that my soul fears And rolls on the darkness of the end of the world, Orders the will, that ties me at the helm, Of His Majesty King John the Second!'"

"The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese."

"The sea is fulfilled, and the Empire fell apart. Lord, Portugal must yet fulfill itself!"

"God wills, man dreams, the work is born."

"Without madness what is man more than the healthy beast, corpse adjourned that procreates?"

"Faithful to the word given and the idea had. All else is up to God!"

"Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, and clear in wanting"

"Against destiny I fulfilled my duty . Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it."

"All beginnings are involuntary."