Fernando Pessoa citations

Page 3

“Je me suis multiplié pour me sentir, Pour me sentir, j'ai eu besoin de tout ressentir; J'ai débordé, j'ai fini par me répandre”

“J’ai eu envie un jour de faire une blague à Sá-Carneiro – inventer un poète bucolique, de l’espèce compliquée, et le lui présenter, je ne sais plus comment, d’une façon plausible quelconque – Je passais quelques jours à tenter d’élaborer le poète mais je ne parvins à rien. Un jour où j'avais finalement renoncé — c'était le 8 mars 1914 — je m'approchai d'une haute commode et, prenant une feuille de papier, je me mis à écrire, debout, comme je le fais chaque fois que je peux. Et j'ai écrit trente et quelques poèmes d'affilée, dans une sorte d'extase dont je ne saurai saisir la nature. Ce fut le jour triomphal de ma vie et je ne pourrai en connaître d'autres comme celui-là. Je débutai par un titre : Le Gardeur de troupeaux.”

“Oh, quelle horreur, quelle horreur intime dénoue la voix de notre âme et les sensations de nos pensées et nous fait parler et sentir et penser quand tout en nous demande le silence et le jour et l’inconscience de la vie”

“Il n'est pas suffisant de ne pas être aveugle pour voir les arbres et les fleurs. Il faut aussi n'avoir aucune philosophie. Quand il y a philosophie, il n'y a pas d'arbres: il y a des idées, sans plus”

“Ma vie tourne autour de mon œuvre littéraire - qu’elle soit, ou puisse être, bonne ou mauvaise. Tout le reste, dans la vie, n’a qu’un intérêt secondaire”

“L'abîme est ma clôture, être moi n'a pas de mesure”

“Substitue-toi à Dieu sans vergogne. C’est la seule attitude réellement religieuse. (Dieu est partout sauf en lui-même).”

“La mer est la religion de la Nature”

“Surviens toi à toi même.”

“Nous sommes aussi grands que nos rêves.”

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

“At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.”

“Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.”

“Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!”

“I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.”

“I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.”

“Without madness what is man
more than the healthy beast,
corpse adjourned that procreates?”

“The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own”

“Every gesture is a revolutionary act.”

“Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.”

“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.”

“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.”