Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

Pensar uma flor é vê-la e cheirá-la E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido.

Ich bin es müde, geträumt zu haben, freilich nicht müde zu träumen.

We know that the book we will never write will be bad. Even worse will be the one we put off writing. At least the book that has been written exists.

The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it's true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.

Queen, goodbye forever! Your wings were sunbeams, and my feet are clay I'll never be well if I don't get to bed I never was well unless I was stretched out across the universe.

But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul's body. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?

Se te queres matar, porque não te queres matar? Ah, aproveita! que eu, que tanto amo a morte e a vida, Se ousasse matar-me, também me mataria... Ah, se ousares, ousa!

Sim, eis o que os meus sentidos aprenderam sozinhos: — As cousas não têm significação: têm existência. As cousas são o único sentido oculto das cousas.

Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don't find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. THere are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there's a certain sensuality.....

I believe in the world as in a daisy, Because I see it. But I don't think about it, Because to think is to not understand. The world wasn't made for us to think about it (To think is to have eyes that aren't well) But to look at it and to be in agreement.

Let us not be deceived by hope, because it betrays, or by love, because it grows weary, or by life, because it satiates but does not sate, or even by death, because it brings more than you want and less than you expect.

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.

Entre mim e a vida há um vidro ténue. Por mais nitidamente que eu veja e compreenda a vida, eu não lhe posso tocar.

I'm sure that all this, I mean other people's attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.

Those who really suffer don't form groups, don't go around in a gang. Those who suffer suffer alone.

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

Para realizar um sonho é preciso esquecê-lo, distrair dele a atenção. Por isso realizar é não realizar.

Tudo o mais é uma grande maçada para quem está presente por acaso. E a sociedade em que nascemos é o lugar onde mais por acaso estamos presentes.

Ser compreendido é prostituir-se.

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.

Si después de morir , quieres escribir mi biografía No hay nada más sencillo. Tiene sólo dos fechas : la de mi nacimiento y la de mi muerte. Entre una y otra todos los días son míos.

Civilisation consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities.

And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.

Life is the hesitation between an exclamation mark and a question mark. After doubt there is a full stop.