Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

Everything is absurd.

One can see only what one has already seen.

il Destino è una specie di persona, e smette di tormentarci se mostriamo indifferenti a quello che ci fa.

Porque eu sou do tamanho do que vejo. E não do tamanho da minha altura...

The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world's facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world's diversity. I don't know if I'm happy this way. Nor do I care.

The trivialities natural to life, the insignificancies of the normal and vulgar, lie like a layer of dust, tracing a blurred, grotesque line beneath the squalor and meanness of my human existence.

I want you only to dream of you,' they tell the beloved woman in verses they never send – they who dare not tell her anything. This 'I want you only to dream of you' is a verse from an old poem of mine. I record the memory with a smile, and don't even comment on the smile.

No one understands anyone else.

My sorrow that makes me Love all that's indefinite … — Fernando Pessoa, from "[A piano on my street …]," A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems , ed. & transl. Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics, 2006)

We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

I am beginning to be conscious of being conscious.

Nunca tive outra preocupação verdadeira senão a minha vida interior.

Que mãos estenderei para que universo? O universo não é meu: sou eu.

Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closest to God, for they want to exist.

The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness* of the sad. Just as the normal man talks nonsense and slaps others on the back out of zest and vitality, so those incapable of joy and enthusiasm do somersaults in their minds and perform, in their own cold way, the warm gestures of life. 297.

A melhor maneira de começar a sonhar é mediante livros.

I gave up everything I searched for in life precisely because I had to search for it.

All the world, all life, is a vast system of unconscious agents operating through individual consciousnesses.

Com duas mãos - o Ato e o Destino - Desvendamos. No mesmo gesto, ao céu Uma ergue o facho trêmulo e divino E a outra afasta o véu. Fosse a hora que haver ou a que havia A mão que ao Ocidente o véu rasgou, Foi alma a Ciência e o corpo a Ousadia Da mão que desvendou.

Life is what we do with it. Trips are travelers. What we see is not what we see, but what we are.

Kiekvienas iš m?s? yra du, ir kai du žmon?s susitinka, suart?ja, susiriša, retai visas ketvertas sutaria. Svajojantis žmogus, esantis kiekviename veikian?iame žmoguje, dažnokai pešasi su veikian?iu žmogumi - tai kaipgi jie nesipeš su veikian?iu žmogumi ir svajojan?iu žmogumi, esan?iais Kitame?

Recordemo-nos sempre de que sonhar é procurarmo-nos.

Olá, guardador de rebanhos, Aí à beira da estrada, Que te diz o vento que passa?"   "Que é vento, e que passa, E que já passou antes, E que passará depois. E