Fernando Pessoa Quotes

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

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

Let's develop theories patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them - acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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.

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

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

Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling,
and clear in wanting

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.

Fernando Pessoa

Out of a few misunderstandings with reality we construct beliefs and hopes, and we live on these crusts, which we call bread, just like poor children who play at being happy.

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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