Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, enisled in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However hard one soul struggles to know another soul, he can only judge by what words are spoken - a formless shadow on the floor of his understanding.

Am s? m? pierd în cea??,ca un str?in de toate,insul? uman? detaÅŸat? de visul m?rii,nav? înc?rcat? inutil cu prea mult? fiin?? ÅŸi prea mult din tot restul.

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea

Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.

Me detengo a orillas de mí y me asomo… Abismo… Y en ese abismo el Universo.

De meu, só sinto uma incapacidade enorme, um vácuo imenso, uma incompetência ante tudo o que é vida. (...) Nunca aprendi a existir.

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I'm proud of myself for dissenting from life.

Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we're not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not assuredly) they don't, we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.

Cada pessoa é apenas o sonho de si próprio. Eu nem isso sou.

A sexualidade é uma ética animal, a primeira e a mais instintiva das éticas.

Recognizing that reality is a kind of illusion, and that illusion is a kind of reality, is simultaneously necessary and pointless.

I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway house between things, like myself, that are nothing.

No soy nadie, nadie. No sé sentir, no sé pensar, no sé querer. Soy un personaje de novela por escribir, que pasa por el aire, deshecho sin haber existido, entre sueños de quien no me ha sabido formular.

Creo en el mundo como en una margarita porque lo veo. Pero no pienso en él, porque pensar es no comprender... El mundo no se hizo para pensar en él (pensar es estar enfermo de los ojos) sino para mirar hacia él y estar de acuerdo... Yo no tengo filosofía: tengo sentidos... Si hablo de la Naturaleza no es porque sepa lo que es sino porque la amo, y la amo por eso, porque quien ama nunca sabe lo que ama ni sabe por qué ama, ni lo que es amar...

Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom.

I live always in the present. I know nothing of the future and no longer have a past. The former weighs me down with a thousand possibilities, the latter with the reality of nothingness.

It's like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness.

As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

I acquired, with regard to action, a transcendental honesty which, ever since I became aware of it, has inhibited me from having any strong links with the tangible world.

We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one's self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.

A minha alma está cansada da minha vida

metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity.

Lo que hay de mediocre en los sueños es que todo mundo los tiene.

Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature.