Fernando Pessoa Quotations | Page 3

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.

My boredom with everything has numbed me.

Everything is theater.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

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

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.

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

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

Strength without agility is a mere mass.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

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.

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

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

Humanitarianism is rude.

For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.

One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

Faithful to the word given and the idea had.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal?

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.

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

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

In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

Life is good, but Wine is better.

Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.

The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.

What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

Everything is absurd.

Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.

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.

God wills, man dreams, the work is born.

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.

Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.

The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.

Let's develop theories patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them - acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.

Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.

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

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.

The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.

I am the escaped one, After I was born They locked me up inside me But I left. My soul seeks me, Through hills and valley, I hope my soul Never finds me.

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

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.

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

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

All beginnings are involuntary.

I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

pg 9, "The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.

pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.

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

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

My joy is as painful as my pain.

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

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.

You breathe better when you're rich.

The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

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