Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

If there is one thing I loathe, it's a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the superficial ills of the world and proposes curing them by making the more deep-seated ills still worse.

The voyage on the common sea towards some unknown place is perhaps more human than the abstract path to the world's void.

My life: a tragedy booed off the stage by the gods after only the first act.

Quem sabe se eu estarei morto depois de amanhã? Se eu estiver morto depois de amanhã, a trovoada de depois de amanhã Será outra trovoada do que seria se eu não tivesse morrido. Bem sei que a trovoada não cai da minha vista, Mas se eu não estiver no mundo. O mundo será diferente. Haverá eu a menos. E a trovoada cairá num mundo diferente e não será a mesma trovoada

Precisar de dominar os outros é precisar dos outros. O chefe é um dependente

Believe me, only vulgar creatures actually do deceive their husbands.

The weariness caused by all illusions and all that they entail – our losing them, the uselessness of our having them, the pre-weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the regret of having had them, the intellectual chagrin of having had them while knowing full well they would end.

Infine, sarà quel che dovrà essere.

Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self.

Nasciamo senza saper parlare e moriamo senza aver saputo dire. La nostra vita trascorre fra il silenzio di chi tace e il silenzio di chi non è stato compreso, e intorno a tutto ciò, come un'ape in un luogo senza fiori, aleggia sconosciuto un inutile destino.

I've always considered violence, of any type, a particularly cock-eyed example of human stupidity.

I'd like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you've traversed a sensual nightmare.

I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

The essence of pleasure lies in splitting yourself into more than one person.

Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.

The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.

And amid all this confusion I, what's truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I'm the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what's truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls' viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

Amigos, nenhum. Só uns conhecidos que julgam que simpatizam comigo e teriam talvez pena se um comboio me passasse por cima e o enterro fosse em dia de chuva

Where there is form there is a soul.

To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method - that's the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life's will.

What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.

Not even by painting my window with colourful dreams can I block out the noise of the life outside, oblivious to my gazing at it.

Quien nunca ha vivido oprimido no siente la libertad.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself.