Fernando Pessoa quotes

„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 a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are.“

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Life, Art, Music, Way

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

Os sentimentos que mais doem, as emoções que mais pungem, são os que são absurdos – a ânsia de coisas impossíveis, precisamente porque são impossíveis, a saudade do que nunca houve, o desejo do que poderia ter sido, a mágoa de não ser outro, a insatisfação da existência do mundo. Todos estes meios tons da consciencia da alma criam em nós uma paisagem dolorida, um eterno sol-pôr do que somos.
The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 196

World, Feeling, Soul, Nostalgia

Source: The Book of Disquiet

„When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. 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.“

„Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.“

People, Dreams, Feeling, Intelligence

„I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.“

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Feeling, Imagination, Training

Source: The Book of Disquiet

„I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.“

Source: The Book of Disquiet

„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.“

„But my sadness is comforting
Because it’s right and natural
And because it’s what the soul should feel
When it already thinks it exists
And the hand pick flowers
And the soul takes no notice.“

Faith, Law, Feeling, Heart

„And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.“

Sadness, Feeling, Soul, Flowers

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

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Feeling, Soul, Thinking

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.“

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

„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.“

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Feeling, Heart

„Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling,
and clear in wanting“

People, Dreams, Feeling, Sleep

— Fernando Pessoa, book Mensagem

Poem "D. Pedro", verses 1-2
Message
Original: Claro em pensar, e claro no sentir,
e claro no querer

„Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things.“

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

"A Factless Autobiography", number 3, tr. by Richard Zenith
The Book of Disquiet

Life, Feeling, Soul, Night

„Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.“

Ibid., p. 258
The Book of Disquiet
Original: O mundo é de quem não sente. A condição essencial para se ser um homem prático é a ausência de sensibilidade.

World, Feeling

Ibid., p. 156
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Quem sou eu para mim? Só uma sensação minha.

„What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought.“

Ibid., p. 93
The Book of Disquiet
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.

„p>By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps
I write in a fever.
I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this,
For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!
Bridled convulsiveness of raging mechanisms!
Raging in me and outside me,
Through all my dissected nerves,
Through all the papillae of everything I feel with!
My lips are parched, O great modern noises,
From hearing you at too close a range,
And my head burns with the desire to proclaim you
In an explosive song telling my every sensation,
An explosiveness contemporaneous with you, O machines!</p“