Fernando Pessoa Quotes

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

Fernando Pessoa
I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

Fernando Pessoa
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.

Fernando Pessoa
Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.

Fernando Pessoa
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.

Fernando Pessoa
Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.

Fernando Pessoa
Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.

Fernando Pessoa
Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.

Fernando Pessoa
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Fernando Pessoa
Against destiny I fulfilled my duty.
Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.

Fernando Pessoa
For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.

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

Fernando Pessoa
Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.

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

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

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

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
Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

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

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa