Fernando Pessoa Quotes

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“I know nothing and my heart aches”

“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.”

“Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!”

“I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.”

“And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…”

“My boredom with everything has numbed me.”

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

“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).”

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

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

“Life is whatever we conceive it to be.”

“Everything is theater.”

“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.”

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

“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!…”

“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…”

“Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.”

“pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.”

“Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”

“To act—that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success.”

“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”

“There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.”

“Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.”

“Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I crave time in all its duration, and I
want to be myself unconditionally.”

“Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”

“I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.”

“Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”

“The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.”

“To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.”

“Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.”

“Multipliquei-me para me sentir.”

“We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.”

“It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.”

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

“Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.”

“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.”

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

“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.”