Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

However, when you're about to write something, knowing beforehand that it's sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory

I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.

O multicoloured hours!… Moments like flowers, minutes like trees, O time frozen in space, time dead from space and covered by flowers, by the fragrance of flowers, and by the fragrance of the names of flowers!…

Ä°ster var olsunlar ister var olmas?nlar, biz tanr?lar?n kölesiyiz.

Mi espíritu está todo hecho de vacilación y duda. Nada, para mí, es o no puede ser positivo; todo oscila a mí alrededor, y yo con ello; sólo soy incertidumbre. Todo es para mí incoherencia y cambio. Todo es misterio y todo es significante. Cada cosa es un símbolo «desconocido» de lo Desconocido.

what I am aches in me.

Pedras no caminho? Eu guardo todas. Um dia vou construir um castelo.

Each us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently.

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn't superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer's superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it's perfectly useless to hope.

Existo desde el principio del mundo y, desde entonces, soy un ironista.

Amar es cansarse de estar solo: es, por lo tanto, una cobardía y una traición a nosotros mismos.

La soledad es la posibilidad del aislamiento. Si te es imposible vivir solo, naciste esclavo.

Eu adoro todas as coisas E o meu coração é um albergue aberto toda a noite. Tenho pela vida um interesse ávido Que busca compreendê-la sentindo-a muito. Amo tudo, animo tudo, empresto humanidade a tudo, Aos homens e às pedras, às almas e às máquinas.

It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was. And now I'm sleepy, because I think – I don't know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.

Reducir las necesidades al mínimo, para no depender en nada de los demás.

A paz que é dos que não conhecem e esquecem sem querer.

We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known.

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

So great is my tedium, so overwhelming the horror of being alive, that I cannot imagine what could possibly serve as a palliative, an antidote, a balm, a source of oblivion.

Life is what we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man who possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life's reality. This has nothing to do with anything.

I abhor running real risks, but it's not because I'm afraid of feeling too intensely. It's because they break my perfect focus on my sensations, and this disturbs and depersonalizes me. I never go where there's risk. I fear the tedium of dangers.

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future I won't be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I'll have my own kin, people who 'understand' me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I'll have already died long ago. I'll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man's lot in life.

Dusk shrouds the long and useless day. Even the hope it denied us crumbles To nothing . . . Life is a drunken beggar Holding out his hand to his own shadow.