Quotes About Fernando Pessoa

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

To consider our greatest anguish an incident of no importance, not just in terms of the life of the universe, but in terms of our own souls, is the beginning of knowledge.

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.

Heine said that every great tragedy was followed by a general blowing of noses. As a Jew, he saw all too clearly the universal nature of humanity.

What, without madness, is a man More than a beast after feeding, A corpse adjourned, the half-alive breeding?

I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.

His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it's perfectly useless to hope.

metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity.

The letters from the ink in my pen are an absurd map of magic signs.

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

May our love be a prayer … Anoint me with seeing you, and I will make the moments I dream of you into a rosary, with my tediums for Our Fathers and my anxieties for Hail Marys.

Twice in my adolescence – which I feel so remotely it seems like someone else's story that I read or was told – I enjoyed the humiliating pain of being in love.

Tobacco Shop') and compares his thinking to 'an overturned bucket' (in a poem dated 16 August 1934). If Soares thinks that 'Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others' (Text 348), a Ricardo Reis ode (dated 1 November 1930) maintains that 'The same love by which we're loved/Oppresses us with its wanting.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective.

All the world, all life, is a vast system of unconscious agents operating through individual consciousnesses.

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it.

I'd like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression of continual tedium in a sensual nightmare.

Good deeds are impositions; that's why I categorically abhor them.

And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a kind of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day – a day without time or substance – an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.

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

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.

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.

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