Quotes from Fernando Pessoa

In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I've always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I've loved, I've pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

I believe in the World as in a daisy. Because I see it. But I don't think about it Because thinking is not understanding…

I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.

What matters is to be natural and calm In happiness and in unhappiness, To feel as if feeling were seeing, To think as if thinking were walking, And to remember, when death comes, that each day dies, And the sunset is beautiful, and so is the night that remains . . . That's how it is and how I want it to be . . .

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

The human soul is an abyss

Tomorrow I too - this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks the streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?' And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

És o que falta a tudo. És o que a cada coisa falta para a podermos amar sempre.»

I don't complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.

Does a flower really have beauty? Does a fruit really have beauty? No: they have only color and form And existence. Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist But that I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me. It means nothing. So why do I say about things: they're beautiful?

I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single blissful colour.. ...On a clear bright day even the softness of the sounds is golden...

Trago dentro do meu coração, Como num cofre que se não pode fechar de cheio, Todos os lugares onde estive, Todos os portos a que cheguei, Todas as paisagens que vi através de janelas ou vigias, Ou de tombadilhos, sonhando, E tudo isso, que é tanto, é pouco para o que eu quero.

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation. If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

O meu sentimento é cinza Da minha imaginação, E eu deixo cair a cinza No cinzeiro da Razão.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha. É a minha maneira de estar sózinho.

Voi fi întotdeauna cel care a aÈ™teptat s? i se deschid? uÈ™a, în faÈ›a unui perete f?r? u??".

I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

By day I am nothing, by night I am I.

Triste de quem é feliz ! Vive porque a vida dura. Nada na alma lhe diz Mais que a lição da raiz Ter por vida a sepultura.

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

The existence of laws for the association of ideas, as for all intellectual operations, insults our native indiscipline.