Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

The human soul is a madhouse of the grotesque.

To be content with what one is given shows an attitude fit for slaves; only children ask for more; only madmen want to conquer more, for every conquest is […]

O que me dói não é O que há no coração Mas essas coisas lindas Que nunca existirão… São as formas sem forma Que passam sem que a dor As possa conhecer Ou as sonhar o amor. São como se a tristeza Fosse árvore e uma a uma, Caíssem suas folhas Entre o vestígio e a bruma

The ideal would be to undertake no more action than the false action of a fountain - rising only to fall in the same place, glittering pointlessly in the sunlight and making a noise in the silence of the night that would set any dreamer dreaming of rivers, an absent smile on his lips.

Don't imagine that I write just to write, or to publish, or to produce art. I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, the temperamentally illogical refinement, of my cultivation of states of mind and feeling.

I never go beyond immediate reality. There is nothing beyond immediate reality.

The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it's never entirely good, it's very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.

The god is dead whose cult was to be kissed!

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion.

I aspire to nothing. Life wounds me. I feel uncomfortable where I am and uncomfortable where I think I could be.

If Fate decrees it should happen, so be it. I feel curious about emotions. About facts, whatever they might be, I feel no curiosity whatsoever.

Should we reason our way out of sadness ? But why, when reasoning requires effort ? And the sad man lacks the necessary energy to make any effort at all.

Tu amor por las cosas soñadas era tu desprecio por las cosas vividas.

All it would take to make a catalogue of monsters is to photograph in words the things the night brings to drowsy souls unable to sleep. These things have all the incoherence of dreams without the alibi of sleeping. They hover like bats over the soul's passivity, or like vampires that suck the blood of submission.

Living is pointless. Only looking is worthwhile. If I could look without living, I would achieve happiness, but that's impossible, as is everything we dream about. How ecstatic the ecstasy that did not involve life!

Since the pleasure we get from art is in a sense not our own, we don't have to pay for it or regret it later. By art I mean everything that delights us without being ours – the trail left by what has passed, a smile given to someone else, a sunset, a poem, the objective universe. To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.

Everything belongs to others except my regret that it doesn't belong to me.

Tudo que se passa no onde vivemos é em nós que se passa. Tudo que cessa no que vemos é em nós que cessa.

I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I'm the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing.

Our all-seeing souls were caressed by the visible coolness of the mosses and, as we walked past the palm trees, we felt an intimation of other lands... And our eyes then filled with tears because not even here, where we were happy, were we happy...

Better to write than to dare live, even if living means merely to buy bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale. Later, perhaps… yes, later…

Bog, kom se služilo poljupcima, mrtav je sada!

Feliz, finalmente, quien renuncia a todo, y a quien, por renunciar a todo, nada le puede ser quitado o reducido.

moja najbolja ostvarenja - mjese?ina i ironija.