Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it's the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.

Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass.

It all comes down to trying to experience tedium in a way that does not hurt.

Reality is made up of what is common and shared. That's why we as individuals only exist in the spurious part of our sensations.

Other people's understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border – like a toll – most of the intelligence it contained.

Believe me, if there were no intelligent people pointing out all our various human ills, humanity would not even notice them. Sensitive people make others suffer out of sympathy.

All of history happens in the mist, and the great battles we are told about, the great ceremonies, all man's greatest achievements, are merely great spectacles shrouded in mist, cortèges glimpsed in the distance in the dim twilight.

I'll always be the one who waited for a door to open in a wall without doors

To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it – this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can't live without thinking.

This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word 'duty' is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms 'civic duty', 'solidarity', 'humanitarianism' and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I'm offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

De tanto lidar com sombras, eu mesmo me converti numa sombra - no que penso, no que sinto, no que sou.

La conciencia de la inconsciencia de la vida es el martirio más grande impuesto a la inteligencia.

Hayattan çok az ÅŸey istedim - ama o, o kadar?n? bile esirgedi benden Az?c?k güneÅŸ, k?rlar, bir lokma ekmek bir lokma huzur, can?m? fazla yakmayacak bir yaÅŸama bilincim olsun ve bir de ne kimseye muhtaç olay?m ne el alem bana muhtaç olsun.

peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself.

The weariness of all illusions and of everything that illusions involve — the loss of them, the pointlessness of having them, the anticipatory weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the pain of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing how they would end.

Comme d'usage, le Dictateur se trompe.

I should explain that I really did travel, but everything smacks to me of merely telling myself that I travelled, although I didn't. I carried back and forth, from north to south and east to west, the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living a present, and the tedium of having to have a future. And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future.

Nós nunca nos realizamos. Somos dois abismos – um poço fitando o Céu.

My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as symphony.

Duas vezes jurei ser O que julgo que sou, Só para desconhecer Que não sei para onde vou.

We're convalescents. Most of us are people who never learned an art or a trade, not even the art of enjoying life. Since we're basically averse to prolonged social contact, even the greatest of friends tend to bore us after half an hour; we only long to see them when we think about seeing them, and the best moments we spend with them occur in our dreams.

3. (…) En la vida de hoy, el mundo sólo pertenece a los estúpidos, a los insensibles y a los agitados. El derecho a vivir y a triunfar se conquista hoy con los mismos procedimientos con que se conquista el internamiento en un manicomio: la incapacidad de pensar, la amoralidad y la hiperexcitación. —Libro del Desasosiego, Fernando Pessoa—