Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Book of Disquiet:
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
“My past is everything I failed to be.”
“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
“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.”
“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face--there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”
“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
“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 why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.”
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
“I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.”
“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”
“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
“Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.”
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
