"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."

"It's been a long time since I've been me."

"'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end of the world we were seeking."

"I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing."

"To be understood is to prostitute yourself."

"Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools."

"To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life."

"We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love."

"His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so."

"All problems are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be."

"To act is to rest."

"I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success."

"The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels."

"I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have."

"There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were."

"I never meant to be but a dreamer."

"The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man."

"They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it."