Fernando Pessoa (Writer)

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

— Fernando Pessoa life

What is art but the denial of life?

— Fernando Pessoa life

Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.

— Fernando Pessoa life

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.

— Fernando Pessoa thinking

I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved. [...] I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.

— Fernando Pessoa love

Enthusiasm is rude.

— Fernando Pessoa

My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?

— Fernando Pessoa man

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

— Fernando Pessoa you

My curiosity sister of larks.

— Fernando Pessoa curiosity

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 poem

My homeland is the portuguese language.

— Fernando Pessoa language

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

— Fernando Pessoa art

Art lies because it's social.

— Fernando Pessoa lies

Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.

— Fernando Pessoa belief

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

— Fernando Pessoa time

Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

— Fernando Pessoa self

It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.

— Fernando Pessoa people

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

— Fernando Pessoa possibility

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

— Fernando Pessoa live

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

— Fernando Pessoa hope

We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect.

— Fernando Pessoa man

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 life

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.

— Fernando Pessoa suffering

Everything is absurd.

— Fernando Pessoa absurd

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

— Fernando Pessoa world

What would happen to the world if we were human?

— Fernando Pessoa world

Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.

— Fernando Pessoa man

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

— Fernando Pessoa living

All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

— Fernando Pessoa life

I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. [...] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!

— Fernando Pessoa love

For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about whatever unimportant and curious is going on. [...] The supreme honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic. All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things, of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take an interest in others in order to take care of himself.

— Fernando Pessoa life

Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

— Fernando Pessoa time

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

— Fernando Pessoa absurd

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

— Fernando Pessoa life

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

— Fernando Pessoa evolution

Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams.

— Fernando Pessoa dreams

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

— Fernando Pessoa life

And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true. And when lying starts giving us pleasure, let's speak the truth so that we lie to it.

— Fernando Pessoa love

My head and the universe ache me.

— Fernando Pessoa universe

Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.

— Fernando Pessoa universe

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

— Fernando Pessoa men

I don't believe in the landscape.

— Fernando Pessoa believe

I say it because I don't believe.

— Fernando Pessoa believe

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

— Fernando Pessoa self

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

— Fernando Pessoa read

They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.

— Fernando Pessoa love

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

— Fernando Pessoa absurd

I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.

— Fernando Pessoa present

That's not my love; that's just your life.

— Fernando Pessoa love

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

— Fernando Pessoa dream

There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

— Fernando Pessoa happiness

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

— Fernando Pessoa self

To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations? Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are.

— Fernando Pessoa travel

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

— Fernando Pessoa being

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 eyes

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.

— Fernando Pessoa art

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality.

— Fernando Pessoa reality

Humanitarianism is rude.

— Fernando Pessoa man

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.

— Fernando Pessoa

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.

— Fernando Pessoa soul

The only text left by heteronym The Baron of Teive (or

— Fernando Pessoa

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.

— Fernando Pessoa war

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.

— Fernando Pessoa truth

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.

— Fernando Pessoa truth

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.

— Fernando Pessoa time

I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.

— Fernando Pessoa life

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

— Fernando Pessoa dream

I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.

— Fernando Pessoa god

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

— Fernando Pessoa war

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

— Fernando Pessoa life

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

— Fernando Pessoa acceptance

Original: Triste de quem vive em casa, Contente com o seu lar, Sem que um sonho, no erguer de asa, Faça até mais rubra a brasa Da lareira a abandonar! Triste de quem é feliz! Vive porque a vida dura. Nada na alma lhe diz Mais que a lição da raiz- Ter por vida a sepultura.

— Fernando Pessoa vida

And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.Ibid., number 168

— Fernando Pessoa life

We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky.Original: Somos dois abismos — um poço fitando o céu. Ibid., p. 48

— Fernando Pessoa sky

Whats most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.Original: O que há de mais reles nos sonhos é que todos os têm. Ibid., p. 145

— Fernando Pessoa dreams

Oh salty sea, how much of your salt are tears of Portugal!Original: Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal São lágrimas de Portugal! Poem Mar Português, Verses 1-2

— Fernando Pessoa poem

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.

— Fernando Pessoa faith

Original: Eram dois e belos e desejavam ser outra coisa; o amor tardava-lhes no tédio do futuro, e a saudade do que haveria de ser vinha já sendo filha do amor que não tinham tido.

— Fernando Pessoa amor

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 poetry

Everyone has his vanity, and each ones vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.Original: Cada um tem a sua vaidade, e a vaidade de cada um é o seu esquecimento de que há outros com alma igual. Ibid., p. 88

— Fernando Pessoa soul

Here lies, on the small farthest beach, the Captain of the End.Original: Jaz aqui, na pequena praia extrema, o Capitão do Fim. Poem Bartolomeu Dias, verses 1-2

— Fernando Pessoa art

I always live in the present. The future I cant know. The past I no longer have.Original: Vivo sempre no presente. O futuro, não o conheço. O passado, já o não tenho. Ibid., p. 118

— Fernando Pessoa future

I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.Original: Achego-me à minha secretária como a um baluarte contra a vida. Ibid.

— Fernando Pessoa life

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

— Fernando Pessoa absurd

I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.Original: Durmo e desdurmo. Do outro lado de mim, lá para trás de onde jazo, o silêncio da casa toca no infinito. Oiço cair o tempo, gota a gota, e nenhuma gota que cai se ouve cair. Ibid., p. 59

— Fernando Pessoa time

Original: A experiência directa é o subterfúgio, ou o esconderijo, daqueles que são desprovidos de imaginação.

— Fernando Pessoa

Original: Aquilo que, creio, produz em mim o sentimento profundo, em que vivo, de inconguência com os outros, é que a maioria pensa com a sensibilidade, e eu sinto com o pensamento.

— Fernando Pessoa time

Original: E seja o nosso desprezo para os que trabalham e lutam e o nosso ódio para os que esperam e confiam.

— Fernando Pessoa

Original: O olfacto é uma vista estranha. Evoca paisagens sentimentais por um desenhar súbito do subconsciente.

— Fernando Pessoa time

Pity him who lives at home Happy with his life, Without a dream, a flexing of wings, To make him relinquish Even the warmest ember of his hearth! Pity him who is happy! He lives because life lasts. Nothing within him whispers More than the primeval law: That life leads to the grave.Original: Triste de quem vive em casa, Contente com o seu lar, Sem que um sonho, no erguer de asa, Faça até mais rubra a brasa Da lareira a abandonar! Triste de quem é feliz! Vive porque a vida dura. Nada na alma lhe diz Mais que a lição da raiz- Ter por vida a sepultura.Poem O Quinto Império, lines 1–10

— Fernando Pessoa life

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when theyre happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when theyre sad.

— Fernando Pessoa pain

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

— Fernando Pessoa pain

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