Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

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

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?

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.

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

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.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face – there's nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

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

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.

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

I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

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