Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

To explain is to disbelieve.

Ah, my dead childhood! A corpse ever alive in my breast!

Every struggle, no matter what its goal, is forced by life to make adjustments; it becomes a different struggle, serves different ends, and sometimes accomplishes the very opposite of what it set out to do. Only slight goals are worth pursuing, because only a slight goal can be entirely fulfilled. If I struggle to make a fortune, I can make it in a certain way; the goal is slight, like all quantitative goals, personal or otherwise, and it's attainable, veri

To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity..... Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and absolutely on behalf of some objective.

To have sure and definite opinions, instincts, passions, and a dependable, recognizable character – all of this leads to the horror of transforming our soul into a fact, into a material and external thing.

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.

Nothing grates more on me than the vocabulary of moral intent and social responsibility.

253. … the sacred instinct of having no theories … 254

To write is to objectify dreams, to create an outer world as a material reward [?] of our nature as creators. To publish is to give this outer world to others; but what for, if the outer world common to us and to them is the 'real' outer world, the one made of visible and tangible matter? What do others have to do with the universe that's in me?

The dead are born, they don't die.

I'm handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I'm handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I'm handed doubt, like dust inside a box--but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?

Everything is worth it, when your soul is not small

Today I have only reality, and I cannot play with that … Poor child exiled in his manhood! Why did I have to grow up?

I read as one who's passing through. And it's in classical writers, in the calm-spirited, in those who if they suffer don't mention it, that I feel like a holy transient, an anointed pilgrim, a contemplator for no reason of a world with no purpose, Prince of the Great Exile, who as he was leaving gave the last beggar the ultimate alms of his desolation.

I have in me like a haze Which holds and which is nothing A nostalgia for nothing at all, The desire for something vague. — Fernando Pessoa, opening lines to "[I have in me like a haze]," trans. Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998)

I let my mind wander, and I'm sure that what I'm writing I've already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis – another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life… My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

Pero no me engaño, escribo, sumo, y la escritura sigue, como hecha por un empleado cualquiera de esta casa.

Let us always search for the impossible, since that is our destiny, and let us search for it by way of the useless, since no path goes by any other way, but let us rise to the consciousness that nothing we search for can be found, and that nothing along the way deserves a fond kiss or memory.

O que saiu das agitações políticas de Roma? O Império Romano e seu despotismo militar. O que saiu da Revolução Francesa? Napoleão e seu despotismo militar. E V. verá o que sai da Revolução Russa... Qualquer coisa que vai atrasar dezenas de anos a realização da sociedade livre... Também o que era de se esperar de um povo de analfabetos e de místicos?…'' (Lisboa, janeiro de 1922.)

Reason is the worst type of dream since it carries me into the dream of the regularity of life which does not exist, that is to say, it is doubly nothing.' 'But what does that mean?' Putting my hand on the other's shoulder and holding him in my arms, 'Aïe, my son, what does anything mean?

Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can't have illusions.

More things have died in me than just my past.

Kindness is a temperamental caprice and we do not have the right to make others the victims of our caprice however humane or tender-hearted.

Government is based on two things: restraint and deceit.