Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.

Everything, except boredom, bores me. I'd like, without being calm, to calm down, To take life every day Like a medicine— One of those medicines everybody takes. I aspired to so much, dreamed so much, That so much so much made me into nothing. My hands grew cold From just waiting for the enchantment Of the love that would warm them up at last. Cold, empty Hands.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night, they're full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things

I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.

THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore...

In this calm and stupid life, I never know how I should act.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

pg 9, The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.

Come chocolates, pequena; Come chocolates! Olha que não há mais metafísica no mundo senão chocolates. Olha que as religiões todas não ensinam mais que a confeitaria.

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it.

There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

Tenho amigos para saber quem eu sou.

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

If I were someone else, I'd go along with you all. But since I'm what I am, lay off! Go to hell without me, Or let me go there by myself! Why do we have to go together?

I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.

I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me.