Fernando Pessoa famous quotes

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Symphony #Soul #Sound

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

#Hold Me #Interest #Relatable

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Life #Literature #Way

It's been a long time since I've been me.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Time #Long

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Love Is #Self #Ideas

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

#Long #Ready

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#People #Norm #Exception

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

#Rose #Thorns #Life Is

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Battle #Bears #Wounds

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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.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

#Life #Depressing #Real

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Book #Writing #Thinking

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Taken #Rejected #Understood

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Writing #Feelings #Fever

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Order #Self Destruction #Destruction

My past is everything I failed to be.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Past #My Past

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Tired #Sleep

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Wake Up #Waking #Feels

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Thinking #Want #Feels

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Unique #People #Lasts

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

#Stupid #Acceptance #Intelligent

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Memories #Imagination #Personality

...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

#Painful #Intensity

To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Yesterday #Feelings #Cadavers

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Gestures #Revolutionary

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Hope #Hurt #Regret

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Writing #Years

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Real #Done

The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Strange #Perfume

I know not what tomorrow will bring.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Tomorrow #Last Words

After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Rain #Heart #Sky

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

#Reality #Found

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Opinion #Poet

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Two #Childhood

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Yesterday #Today #Remember

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Life Changing #Destiny #Clothes

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Children #Distance

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
-- Fernando Pessoa

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

#Love #Halloween #Food

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Heart #Mirrors #Inventor

Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Glasses #Matter #Life Is

I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Missing #Looks

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

#Hours #Chrysanthemums

Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Silence #Hopeless

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Perfection #Humanity #Worship

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Hurt #Writing #Soul

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Past #Reality #Possibility

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Vida

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Sick

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Book #Character

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Numbness #Boredom #Soul

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Thinking #Vegetables

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Sadness #Tired #Loss

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Eye #Heart #Men

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Wise #World #Enjoy

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#One Day #Castles #Stones

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Moon #Errors #Perfect

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

#Country #Cities

My homeland is the portuguese language.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Language #Portuguese #Homeland

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Art #Feels

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

#Thinking #Process

What is art but the denial of life?
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Art #Denial

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

#Just Being

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Imagination #Hiding #Hiding Place

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Reality #Men #World

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

#Vanity #Profound #Effort

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

#Stupid #Men #Soul

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.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Hate #Breathing #Ideas

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

#Chaos #Absurd #Planets

Myth is the nothing that is all.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Myth

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Theft #Property

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

#Thinking #Done #Firsts

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

#Humanity #This Generation #Generations

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 #Character #Quality

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

#Passion #Character #Soul

God wills, man dreams, the work is born.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Men #Born

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

#Writing #Definitions #Pages

Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Wise #Men #Action

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Soul #Lilies #Chrysanthemums

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Past #Live In The Present

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

#Hate #Fighting

All beginnings are involuntary.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Involuntary

If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Wall #Philosophical

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

#Dream #Want #Kind

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

#Spirit #Belief #Belief In God

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Mistake #Believe #Self

Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Moving #Air #Looks

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

#Rain #Fall #Sleep

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Time #Rivers #Clothes

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

#Blood #Events #China

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

#Giving #Glory #Poor

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Soul #Worthwhile

I never meant to be but a dreamer.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dreamer #Meant To Be

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

#Men #Jewels #Normal

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

#Looks #Pity #Retired

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Fear #Boredom #Risk

What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Dream #Worthless

The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Real #Sleep #Ideas

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
-- Fernando Pessoa

#Worry #Soul #Inability

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

#Believe #I Believe #Virtue

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

#Desks