Fernando Pessoa Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.

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 reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?

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

Fernando Pessoa
The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.

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
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
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
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
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
Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity.

Fernando Pessoa
Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

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

Fernando Pessoa
Who wants to go beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.

Fernando Pessoa
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

Fernando Pessoa
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.

Fernando Pessoa
Oh salty sea, how much of your salt
are tears of Portugal!

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

Fernando Pessoa
They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.

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
To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

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
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

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
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

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

Fernando Pessoa