Top 100 Fernando Pessoa Quotes
#1. From my village I see as much of the universe as you can see from earth, So my village is as big as any other land For I am the size of what I see, Not the size of my height. - Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
Rabih Alameddine
#2. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Fernando Pessoa
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.
Pessoa, Fernando
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I try to shed what I've learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember
Fernando Pessoa
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. The divine fact of existing shouldn't be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.
Fernando Pessoa
#16. 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
#17. 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
#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. 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
#20. 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
#21. I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
Fernando Pessoa
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me.
Fernando Pessoa
#26. 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
#27. I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die.
Fernando Pessoa
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#34. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
Fernando Pessoa
#35. My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.
Fernando Pessoa
#36. Does dreaming of princesses serve a better purpose than dreaming of the front door to the office?
Fernando Pessoa
#37. But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?
Fernando Pessoa
#38. My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as symphony.
Fernando Pessoa
#39. What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
#40. The only thing I've loved is nothing at all. The only thing I've desired is what I couldn't even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.
Fernando Pessoa
#41. I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.
Fernando Pessoa
#42. To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
Fernando Pessoa
#43. But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?
Fernando Pessoa
#44. Tiny concerns as well as large worries distract us from ourselves, hindering the peace of mind we all aspire to, whether we know it or not.
Fernando Pessoa
#46. Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
Fernando Pessoa
#47. To act - that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success.
Fernando Pessoa
#48. I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
Fernando Pessoa
#49. Before my unfeeling eyes, the repressed bitterness of my whole life peels off the suit of natural joy it wears in the prolonged randomness of every day. I realize that I'm always sad, however happy or content I may often feel. And the part of me that realizes this stands a little behind me ...
Fernando Pessoa
#50. Yet my sadness is a comfort For it is natural and right And is what should fill the soul Whenever it thinks it exists
Fernando Pessoa
#51. Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.
Pessoa, Fernando
#52. To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.
Fernando Pessoa
#53. I'm so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind.
Fernando Pessoa
#54. And I have the others in me. Even when I'm far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I'm all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.
Fernando Pessoa
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I reread? A lie! I don't dare reread. I can't reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing ...
Fernando Pessoa
#59. In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.
Fernando Pessoa
#60. 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
#62. The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman:
the endless sea is Portuguese
Fernando Pessoa
#63. Were we as we should be,
We wouldn't need any illusions ...
Fernando Pessoa
#64. As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.
Fernando Pessoa
#66. 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
#67. I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!
Fernando Pessoa
#68. - I have an anguished, painful need to speak with you.
Fernando Pessoa
#69. I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
Fernando Pessoa
#70. For any spirit of scientific bent, seeing more in something that is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.
Pessoa, Fernando
#71. Where is God, even if he doesn't exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn't commit, to enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.
Fernando Pessoa
#72. I loathe the happiness of all these people who don't know they're unhappy.
Pessoa, Fernando
#73. We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known.
Fernando Pessoa
#74. Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.
Fernando Pessoa
#76. The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!
Fernando Pessoa
#78. Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
Fernando Pessoa
#79. There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.
Fernando Pessoa
#80. 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
#81. I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.
Fernando Pessoa
#82. Let's not even touch life with the tips of our fingers.
Let's not even know the love in our minds.
May we never know the feel of a women's kiss, not even in our dreams.
Pessoa, Fernando
#83. The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.
Fernando Pessoa
#84. I have all the conditions for happiness, save happiness. The conditions are detached from one another.
Fernando Pessoa
#85. Independently of me the grass grows, the rain falls on the grass that grows, and the sun shines on the patch of grass that grew or will grow; the hills have been there for ages, and the wind blows in the same way as when Homer heard it, even if he didn't exist.
Fernando Pessoa
#86. I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
Fernando Pessoa
#87. Pg.9 In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.
Fernando Pessoa
#88. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.
Fernando Pessoa
#90. I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.
Fernando Pessoa
#91. In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I've always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I've loved, I've pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.
Fernando Pessoa
#92. He must be a grown man, stolid, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone's breadwinner - in other words, one of the living dead.
Pessoa, Fernando
#94. Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
#95. There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
Fernando Pessoa
#96. I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Fernando Pessoa
#98. To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
Fernando Pessoa
#99. It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot.
Fernando Pessoa
#100. All letters of love are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they were not
Ridiculous.
Fernando Pessoa
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