Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

It offends me that a man can master the Devil, but not the Portuguese language.

We are all of us the slaves of external circumstance: even at a table in some backstreet café, a sunny day can open up before us visions of wide fields; a shadow over the countryside can cause us to shrink inside ourselves, seeking uneasy shelter in the doorless house that is our self; and, even in the midst of daytime things, the arrival of darkness can open out, like a slowly spreading fan, a deep awareness of our need for rest.

it seems that what's artificial has become natural, and what's natural is now strange. Or rather, it's not that what's artificial has become natural; it's simply that what's natural has changed.

But someone afflicted by tedium feels himself the prisoner of a futile freedom, in a cell of infinite size.

All I want from myself is to observe life. There's a glass sheet between me and it. I want the glass to be perfectly clear, so that it will in no way hinder my examination of what's behind it, but I always want the glass.

It's the fact that in all this — sky, earth, world — there is never anything but myself!

For me, life is a somnolence that does not affect the brain. I keep that free as a place in which to be sad.

RenunÅ£area e libertate.A nu râvni nimic este putere.

The only thing I've loved is nothing at all. The only thing I've desired is what I couldn't even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.

Io stesso, che soffoco dove sono e perchè sono, dove mai respirerei meglio se la malattia è nei miei polmoni e non nelle cose che mi circondano?

Domani anch'io - l'anima che sente e pensa, l'universo che io sono per me stesso - si, domani anch'io sarò soltanto uno che ha smesso di passare in queste strade, uno che altri evocheranno vagamente con un che ne sarà stato di lui?. E tutto quanto ora faccio, quanto ora sento e vivo non sarà niente di più che un passante in meno nella quotidianità delle strade di qualsiasi città.

Death is a bend in the road, / To die is to slip out of view. from "23 May 1932

O Universo não é uma ideia minha. A minha ideia do Universo é que é uma ideia minha. A noite não anoitece pelos meus olhos. A minha ideia da noite é que anoitece por meus olhos. Fora de eu pensar e de haver quaisquer pensamentos A noite anoitece concretamente E o fulgor das estrelas existe como se tivesse peso.   Assim

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life. Music lulls us, the visual arts enliven us, the performing arts (such as dance and drama) entertain us.

Oh odio, alégrame siquiera tú Hazme ver a la muerte royéndolos a todos

I'm ignorant, like these rooftops. I've failed, like all of nature.

What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life?

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.

Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me; everything that has been and that hasn't been jades me. I don't want to have my soul and don't want to renounce it. I want what I don't want and renounce what I don't have. I can't be nothing nor be everything: I'm the bridge between what I don't have and what I don't want.

The basest of all human needs is the need to confide, to confess. It is the soul's need to go outside itself.

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower.

Para cualquier espíritu científicamente constituido, ver en una cosa más de lo que puede verse es ver menos la cosa en sí. Lo que materialmente crece, espiritualmente disminuye.

Kimseyle alay etme, asla kimseyi gülünç duruma düÅŸürme, kalbinin en ücra köÅŸesinde bile yapma bunu… … Ä°nsan yaÅŸam? alaya al?nmayacak kadar hüzünlü ve ciddidir.

No one loves anyone else; he loves What he finds of himself in other. Don't fret if others don't love you. They feel Who you are, and you're a stranger. Be who you are, even if never loved. Secure in yourself, you will suffer Few Sorrows. 10 August 1932