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Speaking and writing make no difference to our basic instinct to survive, which is quite unconscious. All our abstract intelligence is good for is constructing systems, or semi-systematic ideas, which for animals is a simple matter of lying in the sun. Even our ability to imagine the impossible may not be a unique talent, for I’ve seen cats staring at the moon and for all I know they may be wishing for it.

Vasquez is the same as all men of action: captains of industry and commerce, politicians, men of war, religious and social idealists, great poets and artists, beautiful women, spoilt children.
The winner is the one who thinks only those thought that will bring him victory. The rest, the vague world of humanity in general, amorphous, sensitive, imaginative, and fragile, are nothing but the backdrop ...

The alcohol of grand words and long sentences, which, like waves, rise with their rhythmic breathing and fall again smiling, ironic snakes of foam in the sad magnificence of the dark night.

The wretchedness of my condition is in no way affected by the words I am writing, and out of which I am shaping..this random book of thoughts.
Faced by the vast, starry sky and the enigma of so many souls, faced by the night of the unknown abyss and the chaos of utter ignorance—faced by all this...what I write on this paper soul of mine remains fast here..and has little to do with the great expanses of the universe

The farther we advance in life, the more we become convinced of two contradictory truths. The first is that, confronted by the reality of life, all the fictions of literature and art pale into insignificance. Though it is true that the latter afford us a nobler pleasure than life...they are just dreams from which one awakens, not memories or nostalgic longings with which we might later live a second life.

Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men, because they have all renounced their personality—the first because he lives by instinct, which is impersonal, the second because he lives through his imagination, which is oblivion, and the third because he does not live and, not yet having died, sleeps.

Happy is the man who renounces his life in favor of the imagination and finds pleasure in the contemplation of other people’s lives, experiencing not the impressions themselves but the external spectacle of those impressions. Happy the man, who renounces everything and from whom, therefore, nothing can be taken or subtracted.

Happy the man who demands no more from life than what life spontaneously gives him and who guides himself with the instinct of cats who seek the sun when there is sun and, when there is no sun, find what warmth they can. Happy is the man who renounces his life in favor of the imagination and finds pleasure in the contemplation of other people’s lives, experiencing not the impressions themselves (continued)

What spell of ironic witchery led me to believe myself the poet of my own prose, in the winged moment in which it was born in me, faster than my pen could write, like a sly revenge on life’s insults! And rereading it today I watch my precious dolls ripped apart, see the straw burst out of them and see them scattered without ever having been ...