Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

A-Å£i g?si perosnalitatea în faptul de a o pierde,chiar ÅŸi credinÅ£a confirm? acest înÅ£eles al destinului.

The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn't present nor ever can be – absurdity, my love, absurdity.

Ne zevk, ne ün, ne iktidar; özgürlük, yaln?z özgürlük.

It's by the door of thought and the window of observation that suffering comes into one's house.

I'm the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins, whose builder, halfway through, got tired of thinking about what he was building.

I'm talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.

And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul's salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life's pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.

A Decadência é a perda total da inconsciência; porque a inconsciência é o fundamento da vida. O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia.

I open the window. Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.

Both objectively and subjectively speaking, I'm sick of myself. I'm sick of everything, and of everything about everything.

Love, glory, and wealth are prisons.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life. I love life too much to want it to be over; I love not living too much to have an active craving for life.

Hours of ashen wit, days of spatial longing, inner centuries of outer landscapes … And we did not ask ourselves what it was for, because we took pleasure in knowing that it wasn't for anything.

What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art is a refuge for the sensibility that action was obliged to forget.

All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life's reality. This has nothing to do with anything.

My pride was stoned by blind men, my disillusion trampled on by beggars .....

Good deeds are impositions; that's why I categorically abhor them.

These people are more bearable when they describe, since in describing they forget themselves.

Other people's understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings. Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.

Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilization exists only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for it and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren't truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case

For everything that exists I feel a visual affection, an intellectual fondness – nothing in the heart. I have faith in nothing, hope in nothing, charity for nothing. I feel only horror and nausea for the sincere souls of all sincerities and the mystics of all mysticisms, or rather, for the sincerities of all sincere souls and the mysticisms of all mystics.

We were so tenuous and slight that the wind's passing left us prostrate, and time's passage caressed us like a breeze grazing the top of a palm.

Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that's how it had to be.

In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers.