Fernando Pessoa Quotes

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

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

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

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.

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

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

It's been a long time since I've been me.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

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

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

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

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

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

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

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

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

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

Strength without agility is a mere mass.

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

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

My past is everything I failed to be.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

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

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

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

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

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.

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