Pessoa, Fernando Quotes

Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

In sexual love we seek our own pleasure through the intermediary of another's body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure through the intermediary of an idea we have. The onanist may be an abject creature but in truth he is the logical expression of the lover. He is the only one who neither diguises nor deludes himself.

My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life's surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

Living is in itself dying because every new day we enjoy is another day of our lives lost.

He must be a grown man, stolid, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone's breadwinner - in other words, one of the living dead.

These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

Happy the man who demands no more from life than what life spontaneously gives him and who guides himself with the instinct of cats who seek the sun when there is sun and, when there is no sun, find what warmth they can.

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.

Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...I want no more from life than my dreams and this...It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is little and what is a lot?

For any spirit of scientific bent, seeing more in something that is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.

They say tedium is a sickness that afflicts the inert, or only attacks those who have nothing to do. However, this affliction of the soul is subtles than that: it attacks those with a predisposition towards it and is less lenient on those who work or pretend to work (which comes to the same thing anyway) than on the truely inert.

How can I possess with my body, when I don't even possess my body? How can I possess with my soul, when I don't possess my soul? How can I understand with my mind, when I don't understand my mind? There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies, shadows of illusions, and our life is hollow on both the outside and the inside.

Peace at least. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I'm alone and calm. It's like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I'm no longer attracted to anything down here, I'm also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.

If a man of real sensitivity and correct reasoning feels concerned about the evil and injustice of the world, he naturally seeks to correct it first where it manifests itself closest to home and that, he will find, is in his own being. This task will take him his whole lifetime.