Quotes About Fernando Pessoa

All ideals and all ambitions are a hysteria of prattling women posing as men.

Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices.

I sleep on my elbows propped painfully on the railing and feel a great promise in knowing nothing.

Una sola cosa mi meraviglia più della stupidità con cui la maggior parte degli uomini vive la sua vita: l'intelligenza che c'è in questa stupidità.

No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES

Only Tedium, which is a form of aloofness, and Art, which is a form of scorn, gild our [life] with a semblance of contentment.

The absurd lie has all the charm of the perverse with the even greater, ultimate charm of being innocent

the chance circumstances of his life and the direction it had taken were dictated by his instincts, in his case inertia and detachment.

I write my literature as I write my ledger entries-carefully and indifferently. Next to the vast starry sky and the enigma of so many souls, the night of the unknown abyss and the chaos of nothing make sense-next to all this, what I write in the ledger and what I write on this paper that tells my soul are equally confined to the Rua dos Douradores, woefully little in the face of the universe's millionaire expanses.

Envidio —pero no sé si envidio de veras— a aquéllos de quienes se puede escribir una biografía, o que pueden escribir su propia biografía. En estas expresiones sin continuidad ni deseo alguno de continuidad, narro con indiferencia mi autobiografía sin hechos, mi historia sin vida. Son mis Confesiones, y si en ellas nada digo, es que nada tengo que decir.

Teu vestido porque é teu, Não é de cetim nem chita. É de sermos tu e eu E de tu seres bonita.