Quotes About Introspection

Mi-am cucerit, puÅ£in câte puÅ£in, teritoriul interior care urma s? fie al meu. Mi-am cerut, unul dup? altul, întinsurile de mlaÅŸtin? în care nu mai r?m?sese nimic din mine. Åži am scos la iveal? fiinÅ£a mea infinit?, dar a trebuit s? m? scot pe mine din mine cu forcepsul". - Fernando Pessoa, Cartea neliniÅŸtirii

Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.

My self-critical mind allows me to see only the defects and faults in my own work, and so I only have the courage to write snippets and snatches, brief notes on the theme of nonexistence, and yet even the little I write is imperfect.

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they're enthralled by their own impotence.

Os poetas místicos são filósofos doentes,  E os filósofos são homens doidos.

Nadie me ofende si me contradice: para una criatura como yo, de opiniones tan poco sólidas, y de sentimientos tan cambiantes, la discrepancia no tiene aquel sentido de agravio que asume para los firmes y para los dogmáticos, porque yo vivo en habitual discordancia conmigo mismo".

May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

However, when you're about to write something, knowing beforehand that it's sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory

Mi espíritu está todo hecho de vacilación y duda. Nada, para mí, es o no puede ser positivo; todo oscila a mí alrededor, y yo con ello; sólo soy incertidumbre. Todo es para mí incoherencia y cambio. Todo es misterio y todo es significante. Cada cosa es un símbolo «desconocido» de lo Desconocido.

La soledad es la posibilidad del aislamiento. Si te es imposible vivir solo, naciste esclavo.

It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was. And now I'm sleepy, because I think – I don't know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

Chove. Que fiz eu da vida? Fiz o que ela fez de mim... De pensada, mal vivida... Triste de quem é assim!

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.

Between my sleeping and dreaming, Between me and the one in me Who I suppose I am, A river flows without end. "30 August 1933

El único modo de estar de acuerdo con la vida es estar en desacuerdo con nosotros mismos. Lo absurdo es lo divino. Establecer

I've created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I. To create, I've destroyed myself. I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist there except externally. I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me?

I am no pessimist. Happy are those who can make of their suffering something universal. I don't know if the world is sad or bad, nor do I care, because I feel bored and indifferent in the face of other people's suffering. As long as they don't cry or moan — which I find irritating and embarrassing —I greet their suffering with a shrug of the shoulders, so deep is my disdain for them.

Yes it's me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I'm the one here in myself, it's me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn't—it's all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn't want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it's the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)

Why try to be like others if you're condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it's of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don't?

Passa uma borboleta por diante de mim E pela primeira vez no Universo eu reparo Que as borboletas não têm cor nem movimento, Assim como as flores não têm perfume nem cor. A cor é que tem cor nas asas da borboleta, No movimento da borboleta o movimento é que se move, O perfume é que tem perfume no perfume da flor. A borboleta é apenas borboleta E a flor é apenas flor.