Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

My boredom with everything has numbed me.

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

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

Multipliquei-me para me sentir.

My homeland is the portuguese language.

For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.

To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.

Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

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

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

I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.

To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

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

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

All beginnings are involuntary.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

You breathe better when you're rich.

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

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

God wills, man dreams, the work is born.

Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.

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

We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought, And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout, The bleeding of my heart.

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.

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

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

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

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

If the heart could think it would stop beating.

The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine.

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.

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

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

From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

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