"Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious."

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More by Fernando Pessoa

“We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.”

“Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.”

“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.”

“Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.”

“And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.”

“Wasting time has an esthetics to it.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act...The sea…"

— A. E. Housman

Education1859–1936

#mind

"The will to procreate, as lust, engenders wealth and leads the human race to demoralisation , whereas the will to resuscitate, when the problem of returning life is seen as the purpose of conscious be…"

— Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov

Philosophy1829–1903

#philosophy

"Out of my experience, such as it is one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine…"

— William James

Psychology1842–1910

#nature

"At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other …"

— Rudy Rucker

Science1946

#friendship