Fernando Pessoa Quotations

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root.

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

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.

To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.

Whoever, when he dies, leaves on paper a beautiful line of poetry has left the heavens richer and the earth too.

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.

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.

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

It's been a long time since I've been me.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

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

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

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

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

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.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

…to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect…

But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.

For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…

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.

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.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]

My past is everything I failed to be.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

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

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.

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.

I know nothing and my heart aches

The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.

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.

Better to dream than to be.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.

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.

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am.

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore...

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

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

Let's absurdify life, from east to west. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

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.

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.

I’ve always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted—like all orphans—to be the object of someone’s affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat. Whatever be the case, life pains me.

I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

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.

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

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.

After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.

Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

Literature exists because the world isn't enough.