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What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
It's like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist. -- Fernando Pessoa
To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday's lost life. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man. -- Fernando Pessoa
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me! ... -- Fernando Pessoa
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
A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he's concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
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
I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
If I were someone else, I'd go along with you all.
But since I'm what I am, lay off!
Go to hell without me,
Or let me go there by myself!
Why do we have to go together? -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
Money can't buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things. -- Fernando Pessoa
The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman:
the endless sea is Portuguese -- Fernando Pessoa
I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up. -- Fernando Pessoa
That's why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"
God knows, because he wrote it. -- Fernando Pessoa
We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I suffer from life and from other people. I can't look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful - only then do I find myself and feel comforted. -- Fernando Pessoa
THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her ... I'm falling asleep in order to hear her ... Go on, sister, go on ... My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore ... -- Fernando Pessoa
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
We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses. -- Fernando Pessoa
I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
What's attacking me now is a direct humanitarianism ... -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self. -- Fernando Pessoa
The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people! -- Fernando Pessoa
To be understood is to prostitute yourself. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
The nobleman thinks clearly, writes clearly, and controls his emotions, though not his feelings; the bookkeeper controls neither emotions nor feelings, and what he thinks depends on what he feels. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect -- Fernando Pessoa
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague. -- Fernando Pessoa
Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many. -- Fernando Pessoa
From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I'm now my thoughts and not I -- Fernando Pessoa
I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress, for everyone has dreams; the only difference is whether or not we have the strength to fulfil them or a destiny that will fulfil them through us. -- Fernando Pessoa
I abhor running real risks, but it's not because I'm afraid of feeling too intensely. It's because they break my perfect focus on my sensations, and this disturbs and depersonalizes me.
I never go where there's risk. I fear the tedium of dangers. -- Fernando Pessoa
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions. -- Fernando Pessoa
Inside the coop where he'll stay until he's killed, the rooster sings anthems to liberty because he was given two roosts. -- Fernando Pessoa
The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist. I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room. -- Fernando Pessoa
The moon is high up in the sky and it's spring.
I think of you and within myself I'm complete.
A light breeze comes to me from across the hazy fields.
I think of you and whisper your name. I'm not I: I'm happy. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
No-one loves another
More than he loves whatever
another within may have
That is part of one's self -- Fernando Pessoa
His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it's perfectly useless to hope. -- Fernando Pessoa
This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.] -- Fernando Pessoa
But I am not perfect in my way of putting things
Because I lack the divine simplicity
Of being only what I appear to be. -- Fernando Pessoa
Does dreaming of princesses serve a better purpose than dreaming of the front door to the office? -- Fernando Pessoa
I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots. -- Fernando Pessoa
Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny. -- Fernando Pessoa
I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am. -- Fernando Pessoa
O night in which the stars feign light, O night that alone is the size of the Universe, make me, body and soul, part of your body, so that - being mere darkness - I'll lose myself and become night as well, without any dreams as stars within me, nor a hoped-for sun shining with the future. -- Fernando Pessoa
To live is to not think. -- Fernando Pessoa
I created myself, echo and abyss, by thinking. I multiplied myself by going deeply into myself ... -- Fernando Pessoa
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
And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust. -- Fernando Pessoa
Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! -- Fernando Pessoa
If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
There's enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything. -- Fernando Pessoa
The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul. -- Fernando Pessoa
XIII
Lightly, lightly, very lightly
A very light wind passes,
And it goes away just as lightly,
And I don't know what I'm thinking,
Nor do I wish to know. -- Fernando Pessoa
And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. -- Fernando Pessoa
Every gesture is a revolutionary act. -- Fernando Pessoa
Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
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
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
To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction. -- Fernando Pessoa
The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free. -- Fernando Pessoa
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner. -- Fernando Pessoa
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world. -- Fernando Pessoa
It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking. -- Fernando Pessoa
Literature exists because the world isn't enough. -- Fernando Pessoa
Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, look at me move. -- Fernando Pessoa
I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see. -- Fernando Pessoa
In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god. -- Fernando Pessoa
Were we as we should be,
We wouldn't need any illusions ... -- Fernando Pessoa
Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars. -- Fernando Pessoa
When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. -- Fernando Pessoa
Life is good, but Wine is better. -- Fernando Pessoa
In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say. -- Fernando Pessoa
Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it. -- Fernando Pessoa
Liberty is the possibility of isolation. -- Fernando Pessoa
In another age we mastered the physical ocean, thereby creating universal civilization; now we will master the psychological ocean, emotion, mother human nature, thereby creating intellectual civilization. -- Fernando Pessoa
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone! -- Fernando Pessoa
There is no safe standard to tell man from animals. -- Fernando Pessoa
They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space. -- Fernando Pessoa
All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are. Our sense of ourselves then becomes a deserted field at nightfall, with sad reeds flanking a boatless river, bright in the darkness growing between the distant shores. -- Fernando Pessoa
To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness. -- Fernando Pessoa
All letters of love are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they were not
Ridiculous. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me. -- Fernando Pessoa
On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable. -- Fernando Pessoa
Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine. -- Fernando Pessoa
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere. -- Fernando Pessoa
I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won't need a corridor
Of thought leading to words. -- Fernando Pessoa
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races. -- Fernando Pessoa
Yes, everything's just fine.
It's all perfectly fine.
Except for one thing: it's all screwed up. -- Fernando Pessoa
The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels. -- Fernando Pessoa
And in each corner of my soul there's an altar to a different god. -- Fernando Pessoa
There's a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can't touch it. -- Fernando Pessoa
All I want from myself is to observe life. There's a glass sheet between me and it. I want the
glass to be perfectly clear, so that it will in no way hinder my examination of what's behind it,
but I always want the glass. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I'll be in an institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the anonymous throng of those who didn't have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing. -- Fernando Pessoa
Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do Desassossego -- Fernando Pessoa
The country morning exists; the city morning promises. The former makes one live; the latter makes one think. And I'm doomed always to feel, like the world's great damned men, that it's better to think than to live. 202 -- Fernando Pessoa
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
The universe isn't mine: it's me. 139 -- Fernando Pessoa
God wills, man dreams, the work is born. -- Fernando Pessoa
Better to dream than to be. -- Fernando Pessoa
The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified. -- Fernando Pessoa
My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction. -- Fernando Pessoa
I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest. -- Fernando Pessoa
... to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect ... -- Fernando Pessoa
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
In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings -- Fernando Pessoa
Myth is the nothing that is all. -- Fernando Pessoa
We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. -- Fernando Pessoa
Four times in the false year the false season
Changed, in the immutable course
Of times's progression.
Dryness follows greenness, and greenness dryness,
And no one knows which is first, which
Is last, and they end. -- Fernando Pessoa
A disdain full of disgust for those who don't realize that the only reality is each man's soul, and that everything else - the exterior world and other people - is but an unaesthetic nightmare -- Fernando Pessoa
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
To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character - all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external. -- Fernando Pessoa
Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal? -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
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
I don't have enough money to be a dreamer. -- Fernando Pessoa
Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns. -- Fernando Pessoa
Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us. -- Fernando Pessoa
There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes. -- Fernando Pessoa
You breathe better when you're rich. -- Fernando Pessoa
Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind. -- Fernando Pessoa
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart. -- Fernando Pessoa
I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul. -- Fernando Pessoa
I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself. -- Fernando Pessoa
I believe in the World as in a daisy.
Because I see it. But I don't think about it
Because thinking is not understanding ... -- Fernando Pessoa
Let others take up my madness
And all that went with it.
Without madness what is man
But a healthy beast, A postponed corpse that breeds? -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys. -- Fernando Pessoa
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity. -- Fernando Pessoa
I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul. -- Fernando Pessoa
I placidly wait for what I don't know-
My future and the future of everything.
In the end there will only be silence except
Where the waves of the sea bathe nothing. -- Fernando Pessoa
I never had anyone I could call "Master". No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul -- Fernando Pessoa
I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it's nothing: it's only the vision of the human animal who, without wanting, inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel.
Where can the living be? -- Fernando Pessoa
Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. -- Fernando Pessoa
My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning. -- Fernando Pessoa
There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist. -- Fernando Pessoa
Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me? -- Fernando Pessoa
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart. -- Fernando Pessoa
I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else. -- Fernando Pessoa
I wasn't meant for reality, but life came and found me. -- Fernando Pessoa
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing. -- Fernando Pessoa
A physical nausea, prompted by all of life, was born in the moment I woke up. A horror at the prospect of having to live got up with me out of bed. Everything seemed hollow, and I had the chilling impression that there is no solution for whatever the problem may be. -- Fernando Pessoa
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.) -- Fernando Pessoa
Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day. -- Fernando Pessoa
No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES -- Fernando Pessoa
Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination. -- Fernando Pessoa
I try to shed what I've learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
Pg 9, The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. -- Fernando Pessoa
To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
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
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
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
The divine fact of existing shouldn't be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting. -- Fernando Pessoa
Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
Sit under the sun abdicate and be your own king -- Fernando Pessoa
Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power. -- Fernando Pessoa
Only when night comes do I feel, if not happiness, at least some kind of repose which I experience as contentment -- Fernando Pessoa
At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void. -- Fernando Pessoa
I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious. -- Fernando Pessoa
A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths? -- Fernando Pessoa
Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world. -- Fernando Pessoa
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn't come.
I'm free, and against organized, clothed society.
I'm naked and plunge into the water of my imagination. -- Fernando Pessoa
Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. -- Fernando Pessoa
Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts. -- Fernando Pessoa
Back home.. the tablecloth of civilization makes us forget the already painted pine it covers! ([50], Zenith trans.) -- Fernando Pessoa
But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me? -- Fernando Pessoa
Everything is theater. -- Fernando Pessoa
Strength without agility is a mere mass. -- Fernando Pessoa
I've never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn't mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. -- Fernando Pessoa
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men -- Fernando Pessoa
I forget. I don't see. I don't think. -- Fernando Pessoa
I have all the conditions for happiness, save happiness. The conditions are detached from one another. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the atonic clouds to stop greyly lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing. -- Fernando Pessoa
All it takes to be complete is to exist. -- Fernando Pessoa
What is art but the denial of life? -- Fernando Pessoa
I am nothing.
I will never be anything.
I cannot wish to be anything.
Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world. -- Fernando Pessoa
The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world's facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are. -- Fernando Pessoa
Fraternity has subtleties. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping. -- Fernando Pessoa
I never meant to be but a dreamer. -- Fernando Pessoa
I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die. -- Fernando Pessoa
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it -- Fernando Pessoa
Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!
...
I, the solemn investigator of useless things... -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I excuse you from having to appear in my idea of you. -- Fernando Pessoa
Let's absurdify life, from east to west.
Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living. -- Fernando Pessoa
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. -- Fernando Pessoa
Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life. -- Fernando Pessoa
Wasting time has an esthetics to it. -- Fernando Pessoa
In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice -- Fernando Pessoa
And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living. -- Fernando Pessoa
One who has never lived under constraints doesn't know what freedom is. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I don't complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering. -- Fernando Pessoa
Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion. -- Fernando Pessoa
By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night they're full of a meaningless lack of it. -- Fernando Pessoa
In order to understand, I destroyed myself. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Queen, goodbye forever!
Your wings were sunbeams, and my feet are clay
I'll never be well if I don't get to bed
I never was well unless I was stretched out across the universe. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. -- Fernando Pessoa
I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing. -- Fernando Pessoa
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. -- Fernando Pessoa
May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy. -- Fernando Pessoa
Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy. -- Fernando Pessoa
To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Pg.9 In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation. -- Fernando Pessoa
Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist -- Fernando Pessoa
Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. -- Fernando Pessoa
Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one. -- Fernando Pessoa
Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me. -- Fernando Pessoa
I've come to the realization that I'm always thinking and listening to two things at once. -- Fernando Pessoa
Life is a thread that someone entangled. -- Fernando Pessoa
All is worthwhile if the soul is not small. -- Fernando Pessoa
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking. -- Fernando Pessoa
Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.] -- Fernando Pessoa
Let grammar rule the man who doesn't know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves. -- Fernando Pessoa
Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. -- Fernando Pessoa
The letters from the ink in my pen are an absurd map of magic signs. -- Fernando Pessoa
All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they're enthralled by their own impotence. -- Fernando Pessoa
There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
To pretend is to know oneself. -- Fernando Pessoa
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad. -- Fernando Pessoa
I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. -- Fernando Pessoa
If the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living. -- Fernando Pessoa
But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living? -- Fernando Pessoa
Art lies because it's social. -- Fernando Pessoa
I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body. -- Fernando Pessoa
Life is whatever we conceive it to be. -- Fernando Pessoa
Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people. -- Fernando Pessoa
Oh, the continual drunken diversity of flights and departures!
Eternal soul of navigators and their navigations! -- Fernando Pessoa
Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability. 176 -- Fernando Pessoa
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave. -- Fernando Pessoa
Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single blissful colour..
... On a clear bright day even the softness of the sounds is golden ... -- Fernando Pessoa
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
To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours. -- Fernando Pessoa
My worthless self lives on at the bottom of every expression, like an indissoluble residue at the bottom of a glass from which only water was drunk. -- Fernando Pessoa
I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy. -- Fernando Pessoa
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly. -- Fernando Pessoa
God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky. -- Fernando Pessoa
My joy is as painful as my pain. -- Fernando Pessoa
Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd. -- Fernando Pessoa
Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want. -- Fernando Pessoa
The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own -- Fernando Pessoa
- I have an anguished, painful need to speak with you. -- Fernando Pessoa
I know nothing and my heart aches -- Fernando Pessoa
I sleep and unsleep. -- Fernando Pessoa
At other times I wake up from the half sleep I'd fallen into, and hazy images with poetical and unpredictable colours play out their silent show to my inattention. -- Fernando Pessoa
I take comfort in these reflections, since I can't take comfort in life. -- Fernando Pessoa
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does. -- Fernando Pessoa
Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream. -- Fernando Pessoa
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain. -- Fernando Pessoa
It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary. -- Fernando Pessoa
There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. -- Fernando Pessoa
Everything is absurd. -- Fernando Pessoa
Wise is the man who monotonizes his existence, for then each minor incident seems a marvel. -- Fernando Pessoa
For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful -- Fernando Pessoa
A reformer is a man who sees the world's superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. -- Fernando Pessoa
My homeland is the portuguese language. -- Fernando Pessoa
What does a river know about this and what does a tree know?
And I, who am no more than those, what do I know?
Every time I look at things and think about what men think about them,
I laugh like how a brook sounds cool on a stone. -- Fernando Pessoa
I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life. -- Fernando Pessoa
Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And -- Fernando Pessoa
It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living. -- Fernando Pessoa
Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it. -- Fernando Pessoa
That most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method - that's the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life's will. -- Fernando Pessoa
To be great, be entire:
Of what is yours nothing
exaggerate or exclude
Be whole in each thing. Put all that you are
Into the least you do
Like that on each place the whole moon
Shines for she lives aloft. -- Fernando Pessoa
Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away. -- Fernando Pessoa
Contradiction is the essence of the universe. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost. -- Fernando Pessoa
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality. -- Fernando Pessoa
But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it's a circle that rises without ever closing. -- Fernando Pessoa
Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. -- Fernando Pessoa
We live by action - by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want - whether geniuses or beggars - are related by impotence. -- Fernando Pessoa
With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy. -- Fernando Pessoa
I don't remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don't remember. -- Fernando Pessoa
Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way. -- Fernando Pessoa
FIRST WATCHER Why do people die?
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough ... -- Fernando Pessoa
I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company. -- Fernando Pessoa
But oh how many Caesars I have been! -- Fernando Pessoa
I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror. -- Fernando Pessoa
In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act. -- Fernando Pessoa
To possess something is to lose it. To feel something without possessing it is to keep it, because in that way one extracts its essence. -- Fernando Pessoa
There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person's God given ability to make mistakes -- Fernando Pessoa
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
It's human to want what we need, and it's human to desire what we don't need but find desirable. -- Fernando Pessoa
As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written). -- Fernando Pessoa
Leave in a complex state of slumber
Your consciousness of science.
Look At your white face in the wine's red mirror
And then drink the mirror ... and your consciousness -- Fernando Pessoa
To narrate is to create, whilst to live is merely to be lived. -- Fernando Pessoa
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. -- Fernando Pessoa
Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. -- Fernando Pessoa
I shall die as I have lived, surrounded by bric-a-brac, sold by weight among the postscripts added to lost things. -- Fernando Pessoa
Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets? -- Fernando Pessoa
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent. -- Fernando Pessoa
My boredom with everything has numbed me. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Of having forgotten the colour of loves and the taste of hatreds. We thought we were immortal. -- Fernando Pessoa
If the heart could think it would stop beating. -- Fernando Pessoa
I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by. -- Fernando Pessoa
The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life. -- Fernando Pessoa
Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city. -- Fernando Pessoa
We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky. -- Fernando Pessoa
I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul. -- Fernando Pessoa
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes. -- Fernando Pessoa
Give me some more wine, because life is nothing. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting. -- Fernando Pessoa
The Gods sell when they give. Glory is paid for with disgrace. Poor are the happy, for they are Just what passes. -- Fernando Pessoa
My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone. -- Fernando Pessoa
In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays. -- Fernando Pessoa
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them. -- Fernando Pessoa
Humanitarianism is rude. -- Fernando Pessoa
I know not what tomorrow will bring. -- Fernando Pessoa
For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size. -- Fernando Pessoa
When I write, I solemnly visit myself. -- Fernando Pessoa
Art consists in making others feel what we feel. -- Fernando Pessoa
We never love anyone. We love only our idea of what someone is like. We love an idea of our own; in short, it is ourselves that we love. -- Fernando Pessoa
I do not evolve, I simply journey. -- Fernando Pessoa
When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn. -- Fernando Pessoa
There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense. -- Fernando Pessoa
Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes. -- Fernando Pessoa
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
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
My past is everything I failed to be. -- Fernando Pessoa
No, we don't feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep. -- Fernando Pessoa
But my sadness is comforting Because it's right and natural And because it's what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls. -- Fernando Pessoa
Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine. -- Fernando Pessoa
I was more of a genius in dreams than life. That is my tragedy. -- Fernando Pessoa
Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. -- Fernando Pessoa
Faithful to the word given and the idea had. -- Fernando Pessoa
All beginnings are involuntary. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm liberated and lost.
I feel. I shiver with fever. I'm I. -- Fernando Pessoa
It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended. -- Fernando Pessoa
There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness -- Fernando Pessoa
Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men. -- Fernando Pessoa
Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being. -- Fernando Pessoa
Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not. -- Fernando Pessoa
I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success. -- Fernando Pessoa
To be understood is to prostitute oneself -- Fernando Pessoa
I crave time in all its duration, and I
want to be myself unconditionally. -- Fernando Pessoa
Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being. -- Fernando Pessoa
To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived. -- Fernando Pessoa
To think is to destroy. -- Fernando Pessoa
Nature is the difference between the soul and God. -- Fernando Pessoa
You've never heard the wind blow. The wind only speaks of the wind. What you heard was a lie, And the lie is in you. -- Fernando Pessoa
I'm losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless. -- Fernando Pessoa
I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain. -- Fernando Pessoa
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. -- Fernando Pessoa
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it. -- Fernando Pessoa
The human soul is an abyss -- Fernando Pessoa
Mankind is a postponed corpse that breeds. -- Fernando Pessoa
The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day. -- Fernando Pessoa
One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard. -- Fernando Pessoa
I don't believe in the landscape. -- Fernando Pessoa
Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary. -- Fernando Pessoa
My curiosity sister of larks. -- Fernando Pessoa
Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! -- Fernando Pessoa
Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result. -- Fernando Pessoa
We feel the weather even when we are unaware that we do. -- Fernando Pessoa
By day I am nothing, by night I am I. -- Fernando Pessoa
To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. -- Fernando Pessoa
I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom. -- Fernando Pessoa
It's been a long time since I've been me. -- Fernando Pessoa
