Fernando Pessoa Quotes

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Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.

Fernando Pessoa

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

Fernando Pessoa

Here lies, in the small extreme beach, the Captain Of The End.

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

Fernando Pessoa

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body.

Fernando Pessoa

I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist. I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

Fernando Pessoa

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

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

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Fernando Pessoa on Wikipedia

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