Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

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? My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.

Isn't love at least a means of possessing ourselves through our sensations? Isn't it at least a way of dreaming vividly, and therefore more gloriously, the dream that we exist?

By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night they're full of a meaningless lack of it.By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no diference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things.

Chove. Que fiz eu da vida? Fiz o que ela fez de mim... De pensada, mal vivida... Triste de quem é assim!

The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one knows… And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.

All I ever asked of life was that it should pass me by without my even noticing it.

Who am I behind this unreality? I don't know. I must be someone. And if I do not seek to live, to act or to feel, it is — believe me — so as not to disturb the already laid-down lines of my false persona.

The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people's burdensome emotions!

The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking that they are killing (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.

El cansancio de todas las ilusiones y de todo cuanto hay en las ilusiones: su pérdida, la inutilidad de tenerlas, el cansancio anticipado de tener que tenerlas para perderlas, la amargura de haberlas tenido, la vergüenza intelectual de haberlas tenido sabiendo que tendrían ese final.

I have always found my awareness of suffering more painful than the suffering itself.

At the end of this day there remains what was left behind of yesterday and what will be left behind of tomorrow: the insatiable, innumerable longing to be always the same and always other.

Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir.

And when the lie begins to give us pleasure, let us speak the truth in order to lie to the lie.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent. Enlarge your personality without including anything from the outside – asking nothing from others and imposing nothing on others, but being others when you need them. Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything. It's true that such a life is impossible in the absolute. But it's not impossible relatively.

O único modo de estarmos de acordo com a vida é estarmos em desacordo com nós próprios. O absurdo é divino.

Between my sleeping and dreaming, Between me and the one in me Who I suppose I am, A river flows without end. "30 August 1933

El único modo de estar de acuerdo con la vida es estar en desacuerdo con nosotros mismos. Lo absurdo es lo divino. Establecer

Art frees us, through illusion, from the squalor of being.

How wearisome to let one's existence become something absolutely dependent on someone else's feelings; to have no option but to feel, to love a little too, whether or not it is reciprocated.

I've created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I. To create, I've destroyed myself. I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist there except externally. I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

Mi irrita la felicità di tutti questi uomini che non sanno di essere infelici. La loro vita umana è piena di tutto ciò che costituirebbe una serie di angosce per una sensibilità vera. Ma poiché la loro vera vita è vegetativa, quello che subiscono passa loro accanto senza toccarli intimamente. Vivono con la fortuna autentica di vivere senza accorgersene. Per questo, comunque, vi amo tutti. Miei cari vegetali!

I'm lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don't have what I've obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I'm awake. I wake up as if I'd been sleeping, and I don't belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.