Top 100 Fernando Quotes

#1. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Fernando Pessoa

#2. Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice

Fernando Pessoa

#3. 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

#4. My homeland is the portuguese language.

Fernando Pessoa

#5. 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

#6. These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

Pessoa, Fernando

#7. 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

#8. The Champions League is a big ambition, and all the footballers want to play in it; it is a very important competition.

Fernando Torres

#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. Search, discover, innovate, know, find... keep looking.

Fernando Araya

#13. I work more now perhaps because I know that there is so little time left.

Fernando Botero

#14. 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

#15. North Hollywood isn't actually Hollywood, it's in the San Fernando Valley ... it's not the most glamorous part of L.A.

Elizabeth McGovern

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The divine fact of existing shouldn't be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.

Fernando Pessoa

#19. 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

#20. Fernando Torres needs to be loved on a regular basis

Mark Lawrenson

#21. 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

#22. I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.

David Antin

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. I will be going to Belgium to win
and we will see how the weekend develops from there.

Fernando Alonso

#26. Never in my imagination had I felt so close to my feelings and thoughts.

Fernando Lachica

#27. 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

#28. I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

Fernando Pessoa

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me.

Fernando Pessoa

#33. 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

#34. I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die.

Fernando Pessoa

#35. Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Fernando Pessoa

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I don't have enough money to be a dreamer.

Fernando Pessoa

#39. 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

#40. I sleep and unsleep.

Fernando Pessoa

#41. 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

#42. My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.

Fernando Pessoa

#43. Does dreaming of princesses serve a better purpose than dreaming of the front door to the office?

Fernando Pessoa

#44. But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Fernando Pessoa

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing down. The field is not mature yet and already it accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross National Product.

Fernando J. Corbato

#48. It is better to look good than to feel good.

Fernando Lamas

#49. When God wounds from on high he will follow with the remedy.

Fernando De Rojas

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. After five years in Ferrari, being second all the time, I think it was enough for me.

Fernando Alonso

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. For me it's a simple sport and a simple way to live these seven or eight years of maximum sport.

Fernando Alonso

#57. The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.

Fernando J. Corbato

#58. What is art but the denial of life?

Fernando Pessoa

#59. Battling through poverty was not my forte, and I didn't have the inkling of eluding them.

Fernando Lachica

#60. In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

Fernando Botero

#61. Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

Fernando Pessoa

#62. There was a time when emigration from Cuba was a definitive separation. There were no visits. In the '80s, '90s, it was incredibly difficult. I'm not the only one interested in this as a filmmaker - other Cuban filmmakers have dealt with it, too, because it's such a part of our reality.

Fernando Perez

#63. 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

#64. I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

Fernando Pessoa

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. I think that that Davis Cup final made me much stronger mentally. And this preseason, I was working really hard. So today, I was really believing in myself that I can win the match anyway, that I'm going to five sets. That's so important, no, believe in yourself.

Fernando Verdasco

#68. Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

Pessoa, Fernando

#69. To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

Fernando Pessoa

#70. I'm so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind.

Fernando Pessoa

#71. I have always hated the cinema.

Fernando Arrabal

#72. 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

#73. Art lies because it's social.

Fernando Pessoa

#74. We don't realize how much we create reality through language. If we say that life is hard, it will be hard.

Fernando Flores

#75. I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.

Douglas Sirk

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. An organsation's results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversations.

Fernando Flores

#80. In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.

Fernando Pessoa

#81. I've always been a sad person. I'm a happy person too, but it's a thing in my brain or my spirit or something, I'm just sad and really acutely aware of mortality and loss.

Fernando Torres

#82. 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

#83. Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.

Fernando Pessoa

#84. A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil.

Christopher Hitchens

#85. The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman:
the endless sea is Portuguese

Fernando Pessoa

#86. Were we as we should be,
We wouldn't need any illusions ...

Fernando Pessoa

#87. If football was a drug, I would have died from overdose.

Fernando Torres

#88. 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

#89. Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

Fernando Pessoa

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. - I have an anguished, painful need to speak with you.

Fernando Pessoa

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. ."I shouldn't want you. I'm not good enough for you. I know it and you know it. But that doesn't stop me from wanting you. Just being near you... You bring me peace, beauty," he says in a soft unwavering tone, briefly resting his forehead against mine.

Chantal Fernando

#97. Gide says the hell of this life is that between a hundred paths we have to choose only one, and live with nostalgia for the other ninety nine.

Fernando Sabino

#98. I have always been very calm on the outside. I'm not too stressed now just because I'm in formula one. For me, tomorrow will be another day whether I finish first or last. I have to do the maximum and I cannot ask any more from myself.

Fernando Alonso

#99. I loathe the happiness of all these people who don't know they're unhappy.

Pessoa, Fernando

#100. We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known.

Fernando Pessoa

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