There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.

I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.