Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

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No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

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

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

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

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 pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

Fernando Pessoa
We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.

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
Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.

Fernando Pessoa
We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.

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
I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.

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
Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

Fernando Pessoa
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact, 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

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
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

Fernando Pessoa
Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.

Fernando Pessoa
Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

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
Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.

Fernando Pessoa
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Fernando Pessoa
To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

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
They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.

Fernando Pessoa
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

Fernando Pessoa
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

Fernando Pessoa
I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.

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
The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.

Fernando Pessoa