Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

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.

It's as if someone were using my life to beat me with.

Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what's natural. Whatever I've enjoyed in these vast fields I've enjoyed because I don't live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn't know what freedom is.

To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that's both excessive and uncomfortable.

I've always felt that virtue lies in obtaining what is out of one's reach, in living where one isn't, in being more alive after death than during life, in achieving something impossible, something absurd, in overcoming – like an obstacle – the world's very reality.

Son mis Confesiones, y si en ellas nada digo, es que nada tengo que decir.

Life is whatever we make it. The traveler is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are.

I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.

Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most people live their lives, and that's the intelligence of this stupidity.

To realize I don't remember myself means that I've woken up.

I prefer to fail having known the beauty of flowers than to triumph in a wilderness, for triumph is the blindness of the soul left alone with its own worthlessness.

The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They're idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They're enchanted by life's surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it's beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

I've never known if it was my sensibility that was too much for my intelligence, or my intelligence that was too much for my sensibility. I've always been late, I'm not sure if for the former or for the latter, or perhaps for both, or perhaps it was the third thing that was late.

I have never forgotten that phrase of the biologist, Haeckel, whom I read in the infancy of my intelligence, at that age when one reads scientific publications and arguments against religion. The phrase goes more or less like this: the superior man (a Kant or a Goethe, I think he says) is farther removed from the common man than the common man is from the monkey.

Grande é a poesia, a bondade e as danças...  Mas o melhor do mundo são as crianças,  Flores, música, o luar, e o sol que peca  Só quando, em vez de criar, seca. 

I excuse you from having to appear in my idea of you.

Poseemos algo? Si ni siquiera sabemos lo que somos, ¿cómo hemos de saber lo que poseemos?

I, however, who in this transitory life am nothing, can enjoy the thought of the future reading this very page, since I do actually write it; I can take pride – like a father in his son – in the fame I will have, since at least I have something that could bring me fame.

No encontrar nunca a Dios, no saber nunca, ni siquiera, si Dios existe! Ir pasando de mundo en mundo, de encarnación en encarnación, siempre en la ilusión que halaga, siempre en el error que acaricia.

I'm always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting.

A arte serve de fuga para a sensilidade que a acção teve de esquecer.

In seeking anything, we do so out of ambition, but we either fail to achieve that ambition and are the poorer, or we think we have achieved it and are merely rich madmen.

Everything, for us, is in our concept of the world. To modify our concept of the world is to modify the world for us, or simply to modify the world, since it will never be, for us, anything but what it is for us.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.