Fernando Pessoa - Life Quotes

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Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Fernando Pessoa
… And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

Fernando Pessoa
I suffer from life and from other people. I can't look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

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
Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night, they're full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things

Fernando Pessoa
Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.

Fernando Pessoa
The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

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 come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.

Fernando Pessoa
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

Fernando Pessoa
We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

Fernando Pessoa
To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

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

Fernando Pessoa
I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

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

Fernando Pessoa