Fernando Pessoa Quotes

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

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

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

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought.

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

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

Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.

Fernando Pessoa

The only freedom the gods grant us Is this: to submit Of our own free will to their sovereignty. We should do just that, Since only in the illusion of freedom Does freedom exist.

Fernando Pessoa

We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.

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

Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

The sea is fulfilled, and the Empire fell apart.
Lord, Portugal must yet fulfill itself!

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa

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Born: June 13, 1888

Died: November 30, 1935 (aged 47)

Bio: Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously. He wrote frequently under heteronyms, alter egos with developed personalities, biographies, jobs, habits, attitudes, addresses, etc., who sometimes quoted and interacted with each other and other people.

Known for:

The Book of Disquiet
Message (1934)
O Guardador de Rebanhos (1925)
O EU profundo e os outros eus

Most used words:

Fernando Pessoa on Wikipedia

Fernando Pessoa works on Gutenberg Project

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