1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes
page 2

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them all pseudonyms because he felt that some did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. June 1888 – 30. November 1935  •  Other names Ferdinando Pessoa, Ֆերնանտո Բեսոա
Fernando Pessoa photo
Fernando Pessoa: 288 quotes368 likes

Fernando Pessoa Quotes

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“I know nothing and my heart aches”

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

“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!”

Fernando Pessoa

Source: Poems of Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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?”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…”

Fernando Pessoa

“My boredom with everything has numbed me.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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).”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“Life is whatever we conceive it to be.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“Everything is theater.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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!…”

Fernando Pessoa

Source: Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“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…”

Fernando Pessoa

Source: The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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 book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa

Source: Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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

“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

Source: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

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

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia.
Source: The Book of Disquietude ["Livro do Desassossego"], by Bernardo Soares (Pessoa's semi-heteronym), translated by Richard Zenith (1996), text 1

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa

“Multipliquei-me para me sentir.”

Fernando Pessoa

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 52
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Tornamo-nos esfinges, ainda que falsas, até chegarmos ao ponto de não sabermos quem somos.

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 86
The Book of Disquiet
Original: É nobre ser tímido, ilustre não saber agir, grande não ter jeito para viver.

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

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 248
The Book of Disquiet
Original: E seja o nosso desprezo para os que trabalham e lutam e o nosso ódio para os que esperam e confiam.

“Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A solidão desola-me; a companhia oprime-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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 328
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Não há felicidade senão com conhecimento. Mas o conhecimento da felicidade é infeliz; porque conhecer-se feliz é conhecer-se passando pela felicidade, e tendo, logo já, que deixá-la atrás. Saber é matar, na felicidade como em tudo. Não saber, porém, é não existir.

“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 book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: O tédio é a falta de uma mitologia. A quem não tem crenças, até a dúvida é impossível, até o cepticismo não tem força para desconfiar.

“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 book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 371
The Book of Disquiet
Original: O homem não deve poder ver a sua própria cara. Isso é o que há de mais terrível. A Natureza deu-lhe o dom de não a poder ver, assim como a de não poder fitar os seus próprios olhos.