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Все удовольствие есть ошибка, потому что искать удовольствия — это то, что все делают в жизни, и единственная печальная ошибка — делать то, что делают все.

Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed. The poem I dream has no flaws until I try to realize it. We find this recorded in the myth of Jesus. God, becoming man, cannot help but end in martyrdom. The supreme dreamer has the supreme martyr for a son.

Nothing was going to die yet, but everything – as in a still unformed smile – looked longingly back at life.

No, others don’t exist… It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colours hard and hazy. It’s for me that the great river shimmers below the sunset, even if I can’t see it flow. It’s for me that this square was built overlooking the river, whose waters are now rising. Was the cashier of the tobacco shop buried today in the common grave? Then the sun isn’t setting for him today. But because I think this, and against my will, it has also stopped setting for me.

What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art gives shelter to the sensibility that action was obliged to forget. Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that’s how it had to be.

The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed – they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition.

To want to die in Peking and not be able to is one of the things that weigh on me like a feeling of impending doom.

Perfection is to be God. Our greatest effort takes time; the time it takes passes through various stages of our soul, and each stage of the soul, being unlike any other, taints the character of the work with its own personality. All we can be certain of when we write is that we write badly; the only great and perfect works are the ones we never dream of realizing.

If I had written King Lear, I would be plagued by remorse for the rest of my life. For the sheer greatness of this work grossly magnifies its defects, its monstrous defects, the tiniest things that stand between certain scenes and their possible perfection. It’s not the sun marred by spots; it’s a broken Greek statue.

I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I’m highly nationalistic. My nation is the Portuguese language.

It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar?

No one would love himself if he really knew himself, and without the vanity which is born of this ignorance and is the blood of the spiritual life, our souls would die of anemia.

Art is a science…

It suffers rhythmically.

The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque.

...what ridiculous, frightening and unspeakable things the soul, with a little effort, can recognize in its corners!

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.

I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.