Top 100 Fernando Pessoa Quotes
#2. We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
Fernando Pessoa
#3. I try to shed what I've learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember
Fernando Pessoa
#4. 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.
Fernando Pessoa
#5. 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.
Fernando Pessoa
#6. Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Fernando Pessoa
#7. 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.
Fernando Pessoa
#8. Civilisation consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities.
Fernando Pessoa
#9. I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me.
Fernando Pessoa
#10. Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.
Fernando Pessoa
#13. To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.
Fernando Pessoa
#14. I am the nothingness around which this movement spins, the only reason it spins, not that the center exists except in the fact that all circles have a center. I, really I, am the well without walls, but with the sliminess of its walls, the center of everything with the nothingness around it.
Fernando Pessoa
#15. I'm sure that all this, I mean other people's attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.
Fernando Pessoa
#16. The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Fernando Pessoa
#18. To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all
it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.
Fernando Pessoa
#19. Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.
Fernando Pessoa
#20. Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intellegence inherent in that stupidity. [ ... ] The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest accident becomes imbued with great significance.
Fernando Pessoa
#21. The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.
Fernando Pessoa
#22. Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
#23. To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
Fernando Pessoa
#24. I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
Fernando Pessoa
#25. What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible.
Fernando Pessoa
#26. To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
Fernando Pessoa
#27. Which of us turning to look back down the road along which there is no return, could say that we had walked that road as we should have?
Fernando Pessoa
#28. There's no sunset so lovely it couldn't be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep.
Fernando Pessoa
#31. There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
Fernando Pessoa
#32. My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.
Fernando Pessoa
#34. If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.
Fernando Pessoa
#36. If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.
Fernando Pessoa
#37. And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.
Fernando Pessoa
#38. I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
Fernando Pessoa
#39. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Fernando Pessoa
#40. Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.
Fernando Pessoa
#41. Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result.
Fernando Pessoa
#42. Some people have big dreams in life which they never fulfill. Others don't have any dreams in life, and they don't fulfill those either.
Fernando Pessoa
#43. If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Fernando Pessoa
#45. Of having forgotten the colour of loves and the taste of hatreds. We thought we were immortal.
Fernando Pessoa
#46. The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.
Fernando Pessoa
#47. I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.
Fernando Pessoa
#49. We should be content with the incomprehensibility of the universe; the desire to understand makes us less than human, for to be human is to know that one does not understand.
Fernando Pessoa
#50. I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.
Fernando Pessoa
#52. I always live in the present. I don't know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.
Fernando Pessoa
#53. I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it's time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it's not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I'm no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.
Fernando Pessoa
#54. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And
Fernando Pessoa
#55. Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don't even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn't mine: it's me.
Fernando Pessoa
#56. The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without. There's no room on the pinnacle except for the man himself. The more perfect he is, the more complete; and the more complete, the less other.
Fernando Pessoa
#57. No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it
Fernando Pessoa
#58. I wasn't meant for reality, but life came and found me.
Fernando Pessoa
#59. There's enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.
Fernando Pessoa
#60. Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.
Fernando Pessoa
#62. Peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself.
Fernando Pessoa
#63. I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
Fernando Pessoa
#64. To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it.
Fernando Pessoa
#65. The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering-the long and the slow kind-has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of profoundly felt convalescence.
Fernando Pessoa
#66. I was more of a genius in dreams than life. That is my tragedy.
Fernando Pessoa
#67. Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are. (76)
Fernando Pessoa
#68. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life's reality.
This has nothing to do with anything.
Fernando Pessoa
#69. To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.
Fernando Pessoa
#70. 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.
Fernando Pessoa
#72. My nation is the Portuguese language,' he declared through Bernardo Soares (Text 259), but he also said: 'I don't write in Portuguese. I write my own self.
Fernando Pessoa
#73. The painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.
Fernando Pessoa
#74. Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.
Fernando Pessoa
#76. What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life
me, so calm and peaceful?
Fernando Pessoa
#79. We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
Fernando Pessoa
#80. Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.
Fernando Pessoa
#81. At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.
Fernando Pessoa
#82. I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!
...
I, the solemn investigator of useless things...
Fernando Pessoa
#83. It seems that what's artificial has become natural, and what's natural is now strange. Or rather, it's not that what's artificial has become natural; it's simply that what's natural has changed.
Fernando Pessoa
#84. Between your body and my desire for it
Stretches the chasm of you being conscious.
If only I could love and possess you Without you existing or being there!
Fernando Pessoa
#85. The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.
Fernando Pessoa
#86. This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.
Fernando Pessoa
#87. An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.
An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine ...
Fernando Pessoa
#89. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what's desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.
Fernando Pessoa
#91. What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.
Fernando Pessoa
#92. Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.
Fernando Pessoa
#93. There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.
Fernando Pessoa
#94. I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy.
Fernando Pessoa
#95. What is there to confess that's worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant,
Fernando Pessoa
#96. Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.
Fernando Pessoa
#99. If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
Fernando Pessoa
#100. Caesar gave the ultimate definition of ambition when he said: 'Better to be the chief of a village than a subaltern in Rome'.
Fernando Pessoa
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