Quotes About Philosophy

Everything is absurd.

il Destino è una specie di persona, e smette di tormentarci se mostriamo indifferenti a quello che ci fa.

My sorrow that makes me Love all that's indefinite … — Fernando Pessoa, from "[A piano on my street …]," A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems , ed. & transl. Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics, 2006)

Que mãos estenderei para que universo? O universo não é meu: sou eu.

Kiekvienas iš m?s? yra du, ir kai du žmon?s susitinka, suart?ja, susiriša, retai visas ketvertas sutaria. Svajojantis žmogus, esantis kiekviename veikian?iame žmoguje, dažnokai pešasi su veikian?iu žmogumi - tai kaipgi jie nesipeš su veikian?iu žmogumi ir svajojan?iu žmogumi, esan?iais Kitame?

I always thought of metaphysics as a prolonged form of latent madness.

To live is to be other. It's not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel – it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from everyone. There are serious matters in life to be learned from charlatans and bandits, there are philosophies to be gleaned from fools, real lessons of fortitude that come to us by chance and from those who depend on chance. Everything contains everything else.

Every part of me is a vague nostalgia neither for the past nor for the future: the whole of me is a nostalgia for the anonymous, prolix, unfathomable present.

The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn't present nor ever can be – absurdity, my love, absurdity.

I'm talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.

A Decadência é a perda total da inconsciência; porque a inconsciência é o fundamento da vida. O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia.

Hours of ashen wit, days of spatial longing, inner centuries of outer landscapes … And we did not ask ourselves what it was for, because we took pleasure in knowing that it wasn't for anything.

Since life is essentially a mental state and everything that we do or think is only as valuable as we think it is, it depends on us for any value it may have.

I've done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence.

La dulzura del pasado? El recordarlo, puesto que recordarlo es hacerlo presente y no lo es ni ya lo puede ser —el absurdo, mi amor, el absurdo.

A vida, para a maioria dos homens, é uma maçada passada sem se dar por isso, uma coisa triste composta de intervalos alegres, (...) Achei sempre fútil considerar a vida como um vale de lágrimas: é um vale de lágrimas, sim, mas onde raras vezes se chora. Disse Heine que, depois das grandes tragédias, acabamos sempre por nos assoar.

Se mi capita di essere coerente, è solo per incoerenza della mia incoerenza.

To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity..... Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and absolutely on behalf of some objective.

253. … the sacred instinct of having no theories … 254

I let my mind wander, and I'm sure that what I'm writing I've already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis – another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life… My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

Reason is the worst type of dream since it carries me into the dream of the regularity of life which does not exist, that is to say, it is doubly nothing.' 'But what does that mean?' Putting my hand on the other's shoulder and holding him in my arms, 'Aïe, my son, what does anything mean?

I've always considered violence, of any type, a particularly cock-eyed example of human stupidity.

And amid all this confusion I, what's truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I'm the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what's truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls' viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.