Fernando Pessoa citations

Page 4

“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.”

“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.”