Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is...

Te quiero solo como un sueño.

Quantas vezes os tenho ouvido dizer a mesma frase que simboliza todo o absurdo, todo o nada, toda a insciência falada das suas vidas. É aquela frase que usam de qualquer prazer material: «é o...

To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up...

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can...

I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not...

No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one’s self

We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt’s the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world’s depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone...

The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own

Vivo sempre no presente. O futuro, não o conheço. O passado, já o não tenho.

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all...

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my...

Del amor sólo he exigido que nunca dejase de ser un sueño lejano.

Dios me creó para que yo lo imitara de noche. Él es el Sol, yo soy la Luna. Mi luz flota sobre todo lo que es fútil o ha terminado, fuego fatuo, márgenes de río,...

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the...

There’s a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

To be understood is to prostitute oneself

Existo desde el principio del mundo y, desde entonces, soy un ironista.

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!I can breathe easier now that the...

The human soul is an abyss

Si la liberación no está dentro de mí, no está, para mi, en ninguna parte.

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

Só o que sonhamos é o que verdadeiramente somos, porque o mais, por estar realizado, pertenece ao mundo e a toda a gente

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

Amar es cansarse de estar solo: es, por lo tanto, una cobardía y una traición a nosotros mismos.

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

A tree’s shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree’s shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves’...

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he’s drunk, then I’ll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it’s bad...

What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former it has no novelty...

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

Again I see you, But me I don’t see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment – Only a...

The poet is a faker / Who’s so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Tener opiniones es estar vendido a uno mismo. No tener opiniones es existir. Tener todas las opiniones es ser poeta.

Mejor no fluir en la vida, mejor secarse de tanto soñar.

Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial….Every dream...

My past is everything I failed to be.

Nunca he encarado el suicidio como una solución, porque odio la vida por amor a ella.

¡Ah, no hay nostalgia más dolorosa que la de las cosas que nunca han sucedido!

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create...

Les dieux sont ceux qui ne doutent jamais.

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

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.

Isn’t joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the...

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life,...

Pero ,de verdad vivimos? Vivir sin saber qué es la vida, ,será vivir?.

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My...

This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith...