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Можно сказать, что мы не знаем, что есть зло, поэтому не можем и утверждать, является ли что-то плохим или хорошим. В действительности, однако, любая боль, хотя бы и для нашего блага, есть сама по себе зло, и этого довольно, чтобы она оказалась злом в мире. Достаточно и одной зубной боли, чтобы разувериться в доброжелательности Создателя.

The whole of the human tragedy is summed up in this tiny example of how the people we think about are never the people we think they are.

Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.

Whatever lives, lives because it changes; it changes because it passes; and, because it passes, it dies. Whatever lives is constantly transforming into something else – it continually denies itself, it perpetually evades life.

Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass, a dead interval between Death and Death.

Might not God be an enormous child? Doesn’t the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of a mischievous child? So unreal, so.....

I laughingly threw out this idea for consideration, and only now, seeing it from a distance, do I realize how ghastly it is. (Who’s to say it isn’t true?) And it falls to the ground at my feet, shattering into shards of mystery and pulverized horror…

I wake up to make sure I exist…

The beautiful crimes aren’t the ones we know. Borgia committed beautiful crimes? Believe me that he didn’t. The one who committed beautiful, lavish, fruitful crimes was our dream of Borgia, the idea we have of Borgia. I’m certain that the Cesare Borgia who existed was banal and stupid. He must have been, because to exist is always stupid and banal.

What’s the point of knowing that in the sun or in the rain, as a body or a soul, I will also pass on? No point – just the hope that everything is nothing and nothing, therefore, everything.

To speak is to show too much consideration for others.

I see without wanting to see, helplessly. I attentively watch the non-spectacle. I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.

I’m alone and calm. It’s like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I’m no longer attracted to anything down here, I’m also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I’d ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.

...for me each new conviction means another lost illusion.

I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!

I advance slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine, it’s no longer anything: it’s merely the vision of a human animal that inexorably inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that form the civilization in which I feel and perceive. Where are the living?

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.

I don’t write in Portuguese. I write my own self.

Everything that exists perhaps exists because something else exists. Nothing is, everything coexists – perhaps that’s how it really is. I feel I wouldn’t exist right now – or at least wouldn’t exist in the way I’m existing, with this present consciousness of myself, which, because it is consciousness and present, is entirely me in this moment...

When they feel the ground sliding beneath their feet, then how many men begin to speak the truth, to seek and find, to deny the world’s illusion! And how their illustrious names mark with capital letters – like those found on maps – the insights of sober and learned pages

We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.