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Quotes About Self-awareness

I am nothing. I will never be anything. I cannot wish to be anything. Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
~ Fernando Pessoa
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.
~ Fernando Pessoa
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.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Eu que me aguente comigo e com os comigos de mim.
~ Fernando Pessoa
There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.
~ Fernando Pessoa
All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
~ Fernando Pessoa
And I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Si la liberación no está dentro de mí, no está, para mi, en ninguna parte.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.
~ Fernando Pessoa
There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Were we as we should be, We wouldn't need any illusions . . .
~ Fernando Pessoa
There were people who loved me, There were people I loved. Today I blushed Because of who I once was. I felt ashamed Of being, here and now, The one who always dreams And never steps out, Ashamed of realizing That I can have no more Than this dream of what I could have been - before. 6 August 1934
~ Fernando Pessoa
Mi-am cucerit, puÅ£in câte puÅ£in, teritoriul interior care urma s? fie al meu. Mi-am cerut, unul dup? altul, întinsurile de mlaÅŸtin? în care nu mai r?m?sese nimic din mine. Åži am scos la iveal? fiinÅ£a mea infinit?, dar a trebuit s? m? scot pe mine din mine cu forcepsul". - Fernando Pessoa, Cartea neliniÅŸtirii
~ Fernando Pessoa
We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.
~ Fernando Pessoa
É preciso que todos os que lidam comigo se convençam de que sou assim, e que exigir-me os sentimentos, aliás muito dignos, de um homem vulgar e banal, é como exigir-me que tenha olhos azuis e cabelo louro.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Nadie me ofende si me contradice: para una criatura como yo, de opiniones tan poco sólidas, y de sentimientos tan cambiantes, la discrepancia no tiene aquel sentido de agravio que asume para los firmes y para los dogmáticos, porque yo vivo en habitual discordancia conmigo mismo".
~ Fernando Pessoa
Existo desde el principio del mundo y, desde entonces, soy un ironista.
~ Fernando Pessoa
It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was. And now I'm sleepy, because I think – I don't know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.
~ Fernando Pessoa
I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Who am I behind this unreality? I don't know. I must be someone. And if I do not seek to live, to act or to feel, it is — believe me — so as not to disturb the already laid-down lines of my false persona.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Não me queiram converter a convicção: sou lúcido. Já disse: sou lúcido. Nada de estéticas com coração: sou lúcido. Merda! Sou lúcido.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Duas vezes jurei ser O que julgo que sou, Só para desconhecer Que não sei para onde vou.
~ Fernando Pessoa