Top 32 Best Pessoa Quotes
#1. These pages are not my confession; they're my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.
Fernando Pessoa
#3. 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
#4. In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
Fernando Pessoa
#6. My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?
Fernando Pessoa
#7. Dusk shrouds the long and useless day.
Even the hope it denied us crumbles
To nothing ... Life is a drunken beggar
Holding out his hand to his own shadow.
Fernando Pessoa
#9. I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die.
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
#11. I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me.
Fernando Pessoa
#12. Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.
Fernando Pessoa
#13. A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...I want no more from life than my dreams and this...It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is little and what is a lot?
Pessoa, Fernando
#14. A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to travel but to reach harbour. We found ourselves on the high seas, with no idea of which port we should be aiming for.
Fernando Pessoa
#15. I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
Fernando Pessoa
#16. 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
#17. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Fernando Pessoa
#18. I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.
Fernando Pessoa
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The divine fact of existing shouldn't be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.
Fernando Pessoa
#22. Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.
Fernando Pessoa
#23. 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
#24. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.
Fernando Pessoa
#25. 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
#26. I try to shed what I've learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember
Fernando Pessoa
#27. 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
#28. Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass.
Fernando Pessoa
#29. These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.
Pessoa, Fernando
#30. Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.
Fernando Pessoa
#32. In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.
Fernando Pessoa
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