Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

Between your body and my desire for it Stretches the chasm of you being conscious. If only I could love and possess you Without you existing or being there!

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.

As figuras imaginárias têm mais relevo e verdade que as reais.

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist

En mi corazón hay una paz de angustia, y mi sosiego está hecho de resignación.

I try to shed what I've learned, I try to forget the way I was taught to remember

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

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

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people.

Suddenly I'm all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I'm alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyze is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I'm so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I'm a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house.

I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it's nothing: it's only the vision of the human animal who, without wanting, inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel. Where can the living be?

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

To be understood is to prostitute yourself.

One needs a certain intellectual courage to recognize unflinchingly that one is no more than a scrap of humanity, a living abortion, a madman not yet crazy enough to be locked up; but, having recognized that, one needs even more spiritual courage to adapt oneself perfectly to one's destiny, to accept without rebellion, without resignation, without a single gesture or attempt at a gesture of protest, the elemental curse nature has laid upon one.

And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn't thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he'll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining.

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.

Knowing how easily even the smallest things torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer, how then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life?

Ricordo bene il suo sguardo. Attraversa ancora la mia anima Come una scia di fuoco nella notte. Ricordo bene il suo sguardo. Il resto… Sì, il resto è solo una parvenza di vita.

Todo o mal do mundo vem de nos importarmos uns com os outros,    Quer para fazer bem, quer para fazer mal.

Ser novo é não ser velho. Ser velho é ter opiniões. Ser novo é não querer saber de opiniões para nada.

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

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.