Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.
The book of Disquiet ~ Fernando Pessoa

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you. ~ Fernando Pessoa

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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? ~ Pessoa, Fernando

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 ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I crave time in all its duration, and I
want to be myself unconditionally. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

The moon is high up in the sky and it's spring.
I think of you and within myself I'm complete.
A light breeze comes to me from across the hazy fields.
I think of you and whisper your name. I'm not I: I'm happy. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman:
the endless sea is Portuguese ~ Fernando Pessoa

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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 ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly. ~ Fernando Pessoa

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Queen, goodbye forever!
Your wings were sunbeams, and my feet are clay
I'll never be well if I don't get to bed
I never was well unless I was stretched out across the universe. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I still remember - so vividly I can smell the gentle fragrance of the spring air - the afternoon when I decided, after thinking everything over, to abdicate from love as from an insoluble problem. it was in May, a May that was softly summery, with the flowers around my estate already in full bloom, their colors fading as the sun made its slow descent. Escorted by regrets and self-reproach, I walked among my few trees, I had dined early and was wandering, like a symbol, under the useless shadows and faint rustle of leaves. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a desire to renounce completely, to withdraw once and for all, and I felt an intense nausea for having had so many desires, so many hopes, with so many outer conditions for attaining them and so much inner impossibility of really wanting to attain them. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Humanitarianism is rude. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I know nothing and my heart aches ~ Fernando Pessoa

My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Let grammar rule the man who doesn't know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

The letters from the ink in my pen are an absurd map of magic signs. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [ ... ] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Caesar gave the ultimate definition of ambition when he said: 'Better to be the chief of a village than a subaltern in Rome'. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad. ~ Fernando Pessoa

One who has never lived under constraints doesn't know what freedom is. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

I wasn't meant for reality, but life came and found me. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, but I don't know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer... I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there forever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever painting the curve of the hills… If we could remain that way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing an action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!

Look how it's getting dark!… The positive quietude of everything fills me with rage, with something that's a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches… A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance… A restless tedium makes me think no more of you…

All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both. ~ Fernando Pessoa

- I have an anguished, painful need to speak with you. ~ Fernando Pessoa

A physical nausea, prompted by all of life, was born in the moment I woke up. A horror at the prospect of having to live got up with me out of bed. Everything seemed hollow, and I had the chilling impression that there is no solution for whatever the problem may be. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I'll be in an institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the anonymous throng of those who didn't have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing. ~ Fernando Pessoa

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as. ~ Fernando Pessoa

That's why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"
God knows, because he wrote it. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I created myself, echo and abyss, by thinking. I multiplied myself by going deeply into myself ... ~ Fernando Pessoa

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet ~ Fernando Pessoa

That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations.
The presence of others - always such an unexpected event for the soul - grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble.
I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can't look reality in the eye. The sun itself leaves me feeling discouraged and desolate. ~ Fernando Pessoa

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.
If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

Why try to be like others if you're condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it's of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don't? ~ Fernando Pessoa

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said. ~ Fernando Pessoa

To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I've shaped my life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I've become a not entirely clear and definite individual. ~ Fernando Pessoa

To be understood is to prostitute oneself ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

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

Four times in the false year the false season
Changed, in the immutable course
Of times's progression.
Dryness follows greenness, and greenness dryness,
And no one knows which is first, which
Is last, and they end. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Some people have big dreams in life which they never fulfill. Others don't have any dreams in life, and they don't fulfill those either. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul. ~ Fernando Pessoa

But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible? ~ Fernando Pessoa

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Like all who are impassioned, I take blissful delight in losing myself, in fully experiencing the thrill of surrender. And so I often write with no desire to think, in an externalized reverie, letting the words cuddle me like a baby in their arms. They form sentences with no meaning, flowing softly like water I can feel, a forgetful stream whose ripples mingle and undefine, becoming other, still other ripples, and still again other. Thus ideas and images, throbbing with expressiveness, pass through me in resounding processions of pale silks on which imagination shimmers like moonlight, dappled and indefinite. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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. ~ Pessoa, Fernando

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart. ~ Fernando Pessoa

If the heart could think it would stop beating. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we've felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we've based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn't nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain. ~ Fernando Pessoa

To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. ~ Fernando Pessoa

What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I suffer from life and from other people. I can't look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful - only then do I find myself and feel comforted. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself. ~ Fernando Pessoa

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn't superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer's superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what's left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I'm always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I'm sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or where I am. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. ~ Fernando Pessoa

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget. ~ Fernando Pessoa

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art. ~ Fernando Pessoa

To be understood is to prostitute yourself. ~ Fernando Pessoa

There are inner sufferings so subtle and so diffuse that we can't tell whether they belong to the body or the soul, whether they're an anxiety that comes from our feeling that life is futile or an indisposition originating in some organic abyss such as the stomach, liver or brain. How often my normal self-awareness becomes turbid with the stirred dregs of an anguished stagnation! How often it hurts me to exist, with a nausea so indefinite I'm not sure if it's tedium or a warning that I'm about to vomit! How often… ~ Fernando Pessoa

The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I've never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn't mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. ~ Fernando Pessoa

My lack of initiative was the root cause of all my troubles - of my inability to want something before having thought about it, of my inability to commit myself, of my inability to decide in the only way one can decide: by deciding, not by thinking. I'm like Buridan's donkey, dying at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action; if I didn't think, I might still die, but it wouldn't be from thirst or hunger. ~ Fernando Pessoa