Fernando Pessoa Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

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

Fernando Pessoa
It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa
I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

Fernando Pessoa
Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.

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

Fernando Pessoa
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

Fernando Pessoa
And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.

Fernando Pessoa
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact, 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

Fernando Pessoa
There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Fernando Pessoa
Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.

Fernando Pessoa
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

Fernando Pessoa
I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

Fernando Pessoa