Fernando Pessoa quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Fernando Pessoa on Wise Famous Quotes.

Does dreaming of princesses serve a better purpose than dreaming of the front door to the office?

I don't believe in the landscape.

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Everything is theater.

There's a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can't touch it.

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Were we as we should be,
We wouldn't need any illusions ...

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

I'm so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind.

My boredom with everything has numbed me.

To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells.

All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And

God wills, man dreams, the work is born.

My worthless self lives on at the bottom of every expression, like an indissoluble residue at the bottom of a glass from which only water was drunk.

I wasn't meant for reality, but life came and found me.

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

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.

This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.

Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

All letters of love are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they were not
Ridiculous.

Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it's a circle that rises without ever closing.

Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life.

I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.

The human soul is an abyss

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.

Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me?

To possess something is to lose it. To feel something without possessing it is to keep it, because in that way one extracts its essence.

To be understood is to prostitute yourself.

Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist.

To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person's God given ability to make mistakes

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.

No, we don't feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep.

Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.

Money can't buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.

It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot.

The Gods sell when they give. Glory is paid for with disgrace. Poor are the happy, for they are Just what passes.

These pages are not my confession; they're my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.

Sit under the sun abdicate and be your own king

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept - our own selves - that we love.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal?

Myth is the nothing that is all.

Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.

It's like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness.

But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

Pg.9 In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

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

The painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

I sleep and unsleep.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.

Let's absurdify life, from east to west.
Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?

My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

Pg 9, The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.

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

For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.

There's no sunset so lovely it couldn't be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

- I have an anguished, painful need to speak with you.

To narrate is to create, whilst to live is merely to be lived.

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.

I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!

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

And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

FIRST WATCHER Why do people die?
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough ...

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

... to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect ...

I try to shed what I've learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

I take comfort in these reflections, since I can't take comfort in life.

Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.