Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

158 Sourced Quotes

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

Fernando Pessoa
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.

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 let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.

Fernando Pessoa
Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

Fernando Pessoa
I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

Fernando Pessoa
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
Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.

Fernando Pessoa
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.

Fernando Pessoa
Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.

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

Fernando Pessoa
Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.

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

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

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 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
Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

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

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

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

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

Fernando Pessoa
What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought.

Fernando Pessoa