Fernando Pessoa - Man Quotes

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The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.

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
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality.

Fernando Pessoa
There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

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

Fernando Pessoa
Without madness what is man
more than the healthy beast,
corpse adjourned that procreates?

Fernando Pessoa
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face – there's nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

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
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
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

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