Fernando Pessoa Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Fernando Pessoa
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

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

Fernando Pessoa
I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

Fernando Pessoa
His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so.

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

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

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

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
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.

Fernando Pessoa
These are Fortunate Islands,
These are lands without a place

Fernando Pessoa
If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

Fernando Pessoa
Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.

Fernando Pessoa
I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.

Fernando Pessoa
It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

Fernando Pessoa
Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.

Fernando Pessoa
I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.

Fernando Pessoa
To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character — all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.

Fernando Pessoa
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

Fernando Pessoa