Fernando Pessoa Quotes

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

Fraternity has subtleties.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Life is good, but Wine is better.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

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

In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

Art lies because it's social.

I know nothing and my heart aches

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

My joy is as painful as my pain.

I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.

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

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

To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.

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

Everything is absurd.

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.

We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.

To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character - all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

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

Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

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

I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.

We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

I am the escaped one, After I was born They locked me up inside me But I left. My soul seeks me, Through hills and valley, I hope my soul Never finds me.

Everything is theater.

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

Humanitarianism is rude.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

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

I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.