Alberto Caeiro Quotes

She goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before,
I go on like before, alone in the field.
It's like my head had been lowered,
And if I think this, and raise my head
And the golden sun dries the need to cry I can't stop having.
How vast the field and interior love... !
I look, and I forget, like dryness where there was water and trees losing their leaves. ~ Alberto Caeiro

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Something changed in part of reality - my knees and my hands.
What science has knowledge for this?
The blind man goes on his way and I don't make any more gestures.
It's already not the same time, or the same people, or anything the same.
This is being real. ~ Alberto Caeiro

She's a manner of speaking.
Even the flowers don't come back, or the green leaves.
There are new flowers, new green leaves.
There are other beautiful days.
Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real. ~ Alberto Caeiro

If I die very young, hear this:
I was never anything but a kid playing.
I was a heathen like the sun and the water,
I had the universal religion only people don't have.
I was happy because I didn't ask for anything at all,
Or tried to find anything,
And I didn't find any more explanation
Than the word explanation having no meaning at all. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,
Even when there's not a breeze at all, it seems
Like there's a light breeze blowing for a minute
But the trees are unmoving
In every leaf of their leaves
And our feelings have had an illusion,
An illusion of what would please them... ~ Alberto Caeiro

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.
I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.
They're things known from the outside.
But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head. ~ Alberto Caeiro

A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales
Acts like a sick god, but like a god.
Because even though he affirms that what doesn't exist exists,
He knows things exist, that he exists,
He knows existing exists and doesn't explain itself,
And he knows there's no reason at all for anything to exist.
He knows being is the point.
All he doesn't know is that thought isn't the point.

(10/1/1917) ~ Alberto Caeiro

Also at times, on the surface of streams,
Water?bubbles form
And grow and burst
And have no meaning at all
Except that they're water?bubbles
Growing and bursting. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Praise be to God I'm not good,
And have the natural egotism of flowers
And rivers following their bed
Preoccupied without knowing it
Only with blooming and flowing.
This is the only mission in the World,
This - to exist clearly,
And to know how to do it without thinking about it.) ~ Alberto Caeiro

And sometimes if I want
To imagine I'm a lamb
(Or a whole flock
Spreading out all over the hillside
So I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),
It's only because I feel what I write at sunset,
Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light
And silence runs over the grass outside.
When I sit and write poems
Or, walking along the roads or pathways,
I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,
I feel a staff in my hand
And see my silhouette
On top of a knoll,
Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,
With a silly smile like someone who doesn't understand what somebody's saying
But tries to pretend they do. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
There passes for a moment the figure of a man.
His steps go with "him" in the same reality,
But I look at him and them, and they're two things:
The "man" goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,
And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.
I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.
How perfect that he is in him what he is - his body,
His true reality which doesn't have desires or hopes,
But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them. ~ Alberto Caeiro

But if God is the flowers and the trees
And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,
Then I believe in him,
Then I believe in him all the time,
And my whole life is an oration and a mass,
And a communion with my eyes and through my ears. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I'm glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I've read. ~ Alberto Caeiro

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!
He's stupid if he doesn't know other people's unhappiness is theirs,
And isn't cured from the outside,
Because suffering isn't like running out of ink,
Or a trunk not having iron bands!

There being injustice is like there being death. ~ Alberto Caeiro

One day when God fell asleep
And the Holy Ghost went off flying,
He got into a box of miracles and stole three.
With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run away.
With the second he made himself a human boy forever.
With the third he created a Christ eternally crucified
And left him nailed to the cross that there is in Heaven
Where he's used as a model for other crosses.
Then he ran away to the sun
And came down on the first ray he caught. ~ Alberto Caeiro

That thing over there was more there than it's there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn't look very much, ~ Alberto Caeiro

And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,
And commerce, and the ships leaving
Their smoke on the high seas.
Because he knows all of this lacks the truth
A flower has in its blooming
And which moves with the sunlight
Changing the hills and valleys ~ Alberto Caeiro

The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset? ~ Alberto Caeiro

Those soapbubbles that kid
Amuses himself with by blowing them from a straw
Are transparently a whole philosophy.

Clear, useless and fleeting like Nature,
Friends to the eyes like things,
They are what they are
With a little round airy precision,
And nobody, not even the kid who's making them,
Pretends they're more than they appear to be.

Some are hard to see in the clear air.
They're like a breeze that blows and barely touches the flowers
And we only know it's blowing
Because something lightens in us
And accepts everything more clearly. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I consider a dream like I consider a shadow," answered Caeiro, with his usual divine, unexpected promptitude. "A shadow is real, but it's less real than a rock. A dream is real - if it weren't, it wouldn't be a dream - but less real than a thing. That's what being real is like. ~ Alvaro De Campos

The main thing is knowing how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when you see,
And not think when you see
Or see when you think. ~ Alberto Caeiro

If I could take a bite of the whole world
And feel it on my palate
I'd be more happy for a minute or so...
But I don't always want to be happy.
Sometimes you have to be
Unhappy to be natural...

Not every day is sunny.
When there's been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come.
So I take unhappiness with happiness
Naturally, like someone who doesn't find it strange
That there are mountains and plains
And that there are cliffs and grass...

What you need is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel like someone seeing,
To think like someone walking,
And when it's time to die, remember the day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful...
That's how it is and that's how it should be... ~ Alberto Caeiro

I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys, plains,
That there are trees, flowers, weeds,
That there are rivers and stones,
But there is not a whole these belong to,
That a real and true wholeness
Is a sickness of our ideas. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I was never a keeper of sheep ~ Alberto Caeiro

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I've got it.
I'm a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn't think. ~ Alberto Caeiro

A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;
And the road didn't become more beautiful or even more ugly.
That's human action on the outside world.
We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;
And the sun is always punctual every day.

(5/7/14) ~ Alberto Caeiro

he woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out, not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to lose its ignorance.

I'm perfectly aware no one's obliged to reciprocate love, and great poets have nothing to do with being great lovers. But there's a transcendent spite...

Let her remain anonymous even to God! ~ Alvaro De Campos

What comes, when it comes, will be what it is. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.
Each thing only reminds us of what it is
And it's only what nothing else is.
The fact that it's it separates it from every other thing.
(Everything's nothing without another thing that's not it). ~ Alberto Caeiro

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
And Spring came the day after tomorrow,
I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow.
If that's its time, when else should it come?
I like it that everything is real and everything is right;
And I like that it would be like this even if I didn't like it.
And so, if I die now, I die peacefully
Because everything is real and everything is right. ~ Alberto Caeiro

My look blue as the sky
Is as calm as water in the sun.
It's that way, blue and calm,
Because it doesn't question and it doesn't get surprised...

If I did question or got surprised
New flowers wouldn't bloom in the meadows
And nothing would change in the sun in a way to make it more beautiful...

(Even if new flowers bloomed in the meadows
And the sun turned more beautiful,
I would sense fewer flowers in the meadow
And would find the sun more ugly...
Because everything's like it is and so it's what it is,
And I accept, and I'm not even thankful,
So I don't seem to be thinking about it...) ~ Alberto Caeiro

The Tejo runs down from Spain
And the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.
Everybody knows that.
But not many people know the river of my village
And where it comes from
And where it's going.
And so, because it belongs to less people,
The river of my village is freer and greater. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside.
I don't believe I exist behind myself. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I am a keeper of flocks.
The flocks are my thoughts
and all my thoughts are sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears,
with my hands and with my feet
and with my nose and my mouth.
For to consider a flower is to both see it and smell it
and to eat of fruit is to understand its meaning.

So when the sun is at its brightest
and I feel guilty for embracing it,
I stretch out, supine, on the grassy earth,
and close my sun drenched eyes.
I view my entire body lying firmly on reality,
I know the truth, and am content. ~ Alberto Caeiro

It's stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand. ~ Alberto Caeiro

From my village I see as much of the universe as you can see from earth, So my village is as big as any other land For I am the size of what I see, Not the size of my height. - Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep ~ Rabih Alameddine

If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I'm lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don't need reason - I have shoulderblades. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Nature never remembers, that's why she's beautiful. ~ Alberto Caeiro

To love is to think.
And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.
I don't know what I want at all, even from her, and I don't think about anything but her.
I have a great animated distraction.
When I want to meet her,
I almost feel like not meeting her,
So I don't have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because it's like I'm afraid of her.
I don't know what I want at all, and I don't want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.
I'm asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Water's water and that's why it's beautiful. ~ Alberto Caeiro

It's an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it's the soul
But it's not the soul: it's the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I don't bother with rhyme. Rarely
Are two trees the same, one beside the other.
I think and write like flowers have color
But with less perfection in my way of expressing myself
Because I lack the divine simplicity
Of wholly being only my exterior.

I see and I'm moved,
Moved the way water runs when the ground is sloping
And what I write is as natural as the rising wind... ~ Alberto Caeiro

What does this think about that?
Nothing thinks about anything.
Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants?
If it did, it would be people. . .
Why am I worrying about this?
If I think about these things,
I'll stop seeing trees and plants
And stop seeing the Earth
For only seeing my thoughts...
I'll get unhappy and stay in the dark.
And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I don't know how to talk because I'm feeling.
I'm listening to my voice as if it were someone else's,
And my voice is speaking about her as if she were speaking.
She has hair as blond as yellow wheat in the sun,
And when she speaks her mouth says things that aren't words.
She laughs, and her teeth are as clean as stones in a river. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I'm a keeper of flocks.
The flock is my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and with my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling it
And eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.

That's why when on a hot day
I feel sad from liking it so much,
And I throw myself lengthwise on the grass
And shut my hot eyes,
And feeling my whole body lying on reality,
I know the truth and I'm happy. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I love flowers for being flowers, directly.
And I love trees for being trees without my thought. ~ Alberto Caeiro

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.
To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Night doesn't fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I pass and I stay, like the Universe. ~ Alberto Caeiro

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.
But what is it, a row of trees? It's just trees.
Row and the plural trees aren't things, they're names. ~ Alberto Caeiro

I don't have a philosophy: I have senses...
If I talk about Nature, it's not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking. ~ Alberto Caeiro

The most important part of this is to prepare the athlete for life in general and then be able to compete. ~ Alberto Juantorena

The shaman no longer looks for meaning in life, but brings meaning to every situation. The shaman stops looking for truth and instead brings truth to every encounter. You don t look for the right partner, you become the right partner. And then the right partner finds you. It s a very active practice focused on healing. ~ Alberto Villoldo

Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked.. ~ Alberto Manguel

Winning times in the New York City Marathon have not dropped all that much over the years, but rather U.S. runners went backward. In 1983, there were 267 U.S. men who broke 2:20 in a marathon, and by 2000 that number was down to 27. ~ Alberto Salazar

You would be surprised at the healing power of a simple "I love you" from a dying parent to a child or vice versa. This is not always easy, of course, yet a lifetime of mistakes can be undone through forgiveness even at the end of a life. ~ Alberto Villoldo

When one lives with problems of importance, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance. She doesn't care. ~ Alberto Giacometti

The form is always the measure of the obsession. ~ Alberto Giacometti

There are many actors who have inspired me: Spencer Tracy for his incredible elegance and, of course, Cary Grant. But, there's also an Italian actor I admire a great deal: Alberto Sordi. ~ Alfred Molina

Evil requires no reason. ~ Alberto Manguel

Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes - into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love! ~ Alberto Moravia

I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face. ~ Alberto Manguel

Every few years, in the world of sport, someone ascends to the most rarefied of all levels - the one at which it becomes news not when they win, but when they lose. It must have been like that in the early Fifties, when a tubby Italian called Alberto Ascari was stitching together nine Grand Prix wins in a row, a record not even Fangio, Clark or Senna could match. Or when the great Real Madrid side of Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas won the first five European Cup finals, between 1956 and 1960. Or when Martina Navratilova dominated Wimbledon's Centre Court, winning nine ladies' singles titles in thirteen years. The current Australian cricket team is in just such a run at present, having just completed nine consecutive victories, putting them four wins away from establishing an all-time record. And then there is Tiger Woods. ~ Richard Williams

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs. ~ Alberto Moravia

If only Mexico paid their workers a decent wage. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

Everyone else is waiting for eternity and the shamans are saying, 'How about tonight?' ~ Alberto Villoldo

The Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children. ~ Alberto Manguel

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America - even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles. ~ Alberto J. Mora

In my judgement, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. ~ Alberto Gonzales

The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty] ~ Alberto Moravia

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is. ~ Alberto Giacometti

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. ~ Alberto Manguel

The marathon is like a bullfight. ~ Alberto Salazar

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine. ~ Alberto Manguel

Ancient Egypt 1300BC
Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart
So that your name might live on like theirs!
The scroll is better than the carved stone.
A man has died: his corpse is dust,
And his people have passed from the land.
It is a book that makes him be remembered
In the mouth of the speaker who reads him. ~ Alberto Manguel

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it. ~ Alberto Giacometti

I think what we ought to be focusing on is that we are on path for the release of 75,000 pages of documents in connection with John Roberts' work in the White House, as in the counselor's office and as his time working as an assistant in the office of the attorney general. ~ Alberto Gonzales

We have shown, given these last three years, that we were succeeding in fighting terrorists. While during the first 30 years of the former governments they didn't. ~ Alberto Fujimori

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing. ~ Alberto Manguel

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business. ~ Alberto Moravia

At the end of the day, you realize that this is important stuff, but it isn't as important as how my kids feel about me. That's how I'm going to measure my success - not how I did as counsel to the president or as attorney general. How did I do as a dad? ~ Alberto Gonzales

There is nothing," Naudé wrote, "that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else; therefore the perfect motto is, that there exists no book, however bad or badly reviewed, that may not be sought after in some future time by a certain reader." These remarks demand from us an impossibility, since every library is, by needs, an incomplete creation, a work-in-progress, and every empty shelf announces the books to come. ~ Alberto Manguel

The shaman does not believe in a division between the body and the spirit or between the visible world of form and the invisible world of energy ~ Alberto Villoldo

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose. ~ Alberto Manguel

When you truly have the courage to dream, you have the courage to act as well. ~ Alberto Villoldo

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day. ~ Alberto Moravia

between the beginning of time and 2003, humanity generated roughly five exabytes of data, whereas we now produce the same volume of bits every two days. ~ Alberto Cairo

Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our names, Clausner has written: 'Ne pas chercher à comprendre. ~ Primo Levi

I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords. ~ Alberto Manguel

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. ~ Alberto Manguel

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing. ~ Alberto Manguel

Alberto - the heartless bastards - had long ago killed her inside. With notepads, microphones, and cameras in ~ Samuel Marquis

Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

I submit to you, Mr. President of Congress, my formal resignation as president of the republic. ~ Alberto Fujimori

We expect that in the next years, the economy will improve. And we expect that extreme poverty will drop from 22 percent to 11 percent by the year 2000. ~ Alberto Fujimori

The world looked to them like a great roll of butcher paper unfurled on a table. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn't have limits. Existence means there's always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn't always being some other thing that's beyond it?"

At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.

"Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number - say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 - there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger..."

"But that's just numbers," protested my master Caeiro.

And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:

"What is 34 in Reality, anyway? ~ Alvaro De Campos

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story. ~ Alberto Manguel