Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal são lágrimas de Portugal. (…) Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena se a alma não é pequena. Quem quer passar além do Bojador tem que passar além da dor.

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys.

I asked for so little from life and life denied me even that.

Believing that each step of my life would mean contact with the horror of the New and that each new person I met was a new and living fragment of the unknown to be placed before me on the table for my daily horrified contemplation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go nowhere, to reduce action to the minimum, to avoid as far as possible meeting either men or events, to perfect abstinence and cultivate renunciation. That's how much living frightens and torments me.

perché se la libertà non è in me non la troverò da nessuna parte.

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

Je me suis multiplié pour me sentir, Pour me sentir, j'ai eu besoin de tout ressentir; J'ai débordé, j'ai fini par me répandre

The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering-the long and the slow kind-has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of profoundly felt convalescence.

Dios me creó para que yo lo imitara de noche. Él es el Sol, yo soy la Luna. Mi luz flota sobre todo lo que es fútil o ha terminado, fuego fatuo, márgenes de río, pantanos y sombras.

Só esta liberdade nos concedem Os deuses: submetermo-nos Ao seu domínio por vontade nossa. Mais vale assim fazermos Porque só na ilusão da liberdade A liberdade existe.

Temos, todos que vivemos, Uma vida que é vivida E outra vida que é pensada, E a única vida que temos É essa que é dividida Entre a verdadeira e a errada.

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

I see boats moving on the sea. Their sails, like wings of what I see, Bring me a vague inner desire to be Who I was without knowing what it was. So all recalls my home self, and, because It recalls that, what I am aches in me.

Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the atonic clouds to stop greyly lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing.

a reformer is a man who sees the world's superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills.

All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me. It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It's just unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurls stones, echoes of unknown voices – a collective mishmash of life.

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

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what's desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

That's why I read, as a stranger, My being as if it were pages. Not knowing what will come And forgetting what has passed, I note in the margin of my reading What I thought I felt. Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?" God knows, because he wrote it.

I find the present monotonous and absurd spectacle of the world outside me so completely lacking in value or nobility that I can scarcely conceive of it as being the world.

Adoramos a perfeição, porque não a podemos ter; repugná-la-íamos, se a tivéssemos. O perfeito é desumano, porque o humano é imperfeito.

Futile and sensitive, I'm capable of violent and consuming impulses – both good and bad, noble and vile – but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. 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.