Fernando pessoa quotes

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

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.

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.)

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.

Art lies because it's social.

Everything is theater.

I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

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

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

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.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

My past is everything I failed to be.

One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

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.

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

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.

God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

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.

The human soul is an abyss

I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful

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.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

Strength without agility is a mere mass.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

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

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.

Life is good, but Wine is better.

The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.

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

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.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

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.

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.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

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.

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.

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Contradiction is the essence of the universe.

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

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!

For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

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!

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.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

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.

I know nothing and my heart aches

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

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.

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

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.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

It's been a long time since I've been me.

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

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.

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.

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

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.

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

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.

Literature exists because the world isn't enough.

Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.

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.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

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.

If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.

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.

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

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.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

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.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.

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.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

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

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

My joy is as painful as my pain.

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.

And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

Multipliquei-me para me sentir.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

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

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.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.