Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

Somos muerte. Esto, que consideramos vida, es el sueño de la vida real, la muerte de lo que verdaderamente somos. Los muertos nacen, no mueren. Están trocados, para nosotros, los mundos. Cuando creemos que vivimos, estamos muertos; vamos a vivir cuando estamos moribundos.

Eres la única forma que no produce hastío porque eres tornadiza con nuestro sentimiento, porque, como besas nuestra alegría, entretienes nuestro dolor y nuestro tedio y eres el opio que conforta y el sueño que nos hace descansar, y la muerte que cruza y junta las manos.

Brothers in our ignorance, different vessels for the same blood, different forms of the same inheritance — which of us can deny the other? Deny your wife but not your mother, your father, or your brother.

Voi tr?i adunat de pe drumuri în cine ÅŸtie ce ospiciu de vagabonzi,fericit de aceast? total? izbeliÅŸte,amestecat cu cei care s-au crezut genii ÅŸi nu erau decât niÅŸte milogi vis?tori,topit în masa anonim? a celor care n-au avut puterea s? reuÅŸeasc? în via?? ÅŸi nici renunÅ£area atât de generoas? cât s? înving? adversit??ile.

Después morirá el planeta giratorio en que todo esto ocurrió.

I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad.

Whoever lives like me doesn't die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without him being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That's all, and we call it nothing;

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: 'Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!' I'm nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he's the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?

Quien está en un rincón del salón baila con todos los bailarines. Lo ve todo y, al verlo todo, lo vive todo.

A morte é a curva da estrada, Morrer é só não ser visto

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

Querer é não poder. Quem pôde, quis antes de poder só depois de poder. Quem quer nunca há-de poder, porque se perde em querer.

Quanto mais eu sinta, quanto mais eu sinta como várias pessoas, Quanto mais personalidade eu tiver, Quanto mais intensamente, estridentemente as tiver, Quanto mais simultaneamente sentir com todas elas, Quanto mais unificadamente diverso, dispersadamente atento, Estiver, sentir, viver, for, Mais possuirei a existência total do universo, Mais completo serei pelo espaço inteiro fora

Mas se Deus é as flores e as árvores E os montes e sol e o luar, Então acredito nele, Então acredito nele a toda a hora, E a minha vida é toda uma oração e uma missa, E uma comunhão com os olhos e pelos ouvidos.   Mas

Independently of me the grass grows, the rain falls on the grass that grows, and the sun shines on the patch of grass that grew or will grow; the hills have been there for ages, and the wind blows in the same way as when Homer heard it, even if he didn't exist.

To dream, for example, that I'm simultaneously, separately, severally the man and the woman on a stroll that a man and woman are taking along the river. To see myself – at the same time, in the same way, with equal precision and without overlap, being equally but separately integrated into both things – as a conscious ship in a South Sea and a printed page from an old book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language.

E eu tenho do alto orgulho a timidez E sinto horror a abrir o ser a alguém, A confiar n'alguém. Horror eu sinto A que prescrute alguém, ou levemente Ou não, quaisquer recantos do meu ser.

I shall die as I have lived, surrounded by bric-a-brac, sold by weight among the postscripts added to lost things.

Perhaps he still hopes. If there's any justice in the Gods' injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they're impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they're trivial. ... Every dream is the same dream, for they're all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.

The art of the child is in non-realization.

to say that, or something similar, might lend colour to the tedium, the way a child draws something then clumsily colours it in, blurring the edges, but to me it's just words echoing around the cellars of thought.

Whirls and whirlpools in the fluid futility of life!

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective.