Fernando Pessoa - Soul Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
Everything is worthwhile
if the soul is not small.

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
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

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
Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

Fernando Pessoa
I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

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
A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside.

Fernando Pessoa
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.

Fernando Pessoa
But my sadness is comforting Because it's right and natural And because it's what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.

Fernando Pessoa
Tomorrow I too - this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks the streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?' And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

Fernando Pessoa