"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."

"I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity."

"Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be."

"I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics."

"There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral."

"These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth."

"Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell."

"We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans."

"To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character — all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external."

"Property isn't theft: it's nothing."

"Humanitarianism is rude."

"I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality."

"In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God."

"Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes."

"I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city."

"To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations?Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are."

"I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself."

"There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist."

"And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream."

"That's not my love; that's just your life."

"I exempt you of being present in my idea of you."

"Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd."

"They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had."

"Life is a thread that someone entangled."

"When I write, I solemnly visit myself."

"I say it because I don't believe."

"I don't believe in the landscape."

"Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it."

"Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches."

"My head and the universe ache me."

"And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true.And when lying starts giving us pleasure, let's speak the truth so that we lie to it."

"Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions."

"Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams."

"Every gesture is a revolutionary act."

"It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended."

"I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing."

"Wasting time has an esthetics to it."

"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."