Fernando Pessoa: Trending quotes (page 11)

“I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”

“Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.”

“THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her… I'm falling asleep in order to hear her… Go on, sister, go on… My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore…”

“Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!…”

“Everything is theater.”

“Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.”

“Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.”

“Life is whatever we conceive it to be.”

“As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).”

“From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I”

“My boredom with everything has numbed me.”

“Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…”

“I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.”

“Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.”

“In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.”

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes to where life is not painful; nor is there a port of call where it is possible to forget.”

“It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.”

“…to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect…”

“What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?”