Fernando Pessoa

“Sou místico, mas só com o corpo. A minha alma é simples e não pensa.”

“Por mim, escrevo a prosa dos meus versos  E fico contente, Porque sei que compreendo a Natureza por fora; E não a compreendo por dentro Porque a Natureza não tem dentro; Senão não era a Natureza.”

“Os poetas místicos são filósofos doentes,  E os filósofos são homens doidos.”

“A beleza é o nome de qualquer cousa que não existeQue eu dou às cousas em troca do agrado que me dão. Não significa nada.”

“Uma flor acaso tem beleza? Tem beleza acaso um fruto? Não: têm cor e forma E existência apenas.”

“As bolas de sabão que esta criança Se entretém a largar de uma palhinha São translucidamente uma filosofia toda.”

“O que é preciso é ser-se natural e calmo Na felicidade ou na infelicidade, Sentir como quem olha, Pensar como quem anda, E quando se vai morrer, lembrar-se de que o dia morre, E que o poente é belo e é bela a noite que fica...”

“Nem tudo é dias de sol, E a chuva, quando falta muito, pede-se. Por isso tomo a infelicidade com a felicidade Naturalmente, como quem não estranha Que haja montanhas e planícies E que haja rochedos e erva...”

“Se eu pudesse trincar a terra toda  E sentir-lhe uma paladar, Seria mais feliz um momento ...  Mas eu nem sempre quero ser feliz.  É preciso ser de vez em quando infeliz  Para se poder ser natural...”

“Pensar uma flor é vê-la e cheirá-la E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido.”

“Amar é a eterna inocência, E a única inocência não pensar...”

“O único sentido íntimo das cousas É elas não terem sentido íntimo nenhum.  ”

“Não me importo com as rimas.  Raras vezes Há duas árvores iguais, uma ao lado da outra.”

“Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]”

“If only, I feel now, if only I could be someone able to see all this as if he had no other relation with it than that of seeing it, someone able to observe everything as if he were an adult traveler newly arrived today on the surface of life! If only one had not learned, from birth onwards, to give certain accepted meanings to everything, but instead was able to see the meaning inherent in each thing rather than that imposed on it from without. If only one could know the human reality of the woman selling fish and go beyond just labeling her a fishwife and the known fact that she exists and sells fish. If only one could see the policeman as God sees him. If only one could notice everything for the first time, not apocalyptically, as if they were revelations of the Mystery, but directly as the flowerings of Reality.”

“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”

“My boredom with everything has numbed me.”

“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.”

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

“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”

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

“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.”

“Everything is theater.”

“All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.”

“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”

“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”

“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.”

“Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.”

“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”

“A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.”

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

“This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.]”

“Não sabíamos que a ordem nas ruas, nas estradas, nas pontes e nas esquadras tinha de ser comprada por tão alto preço - o da venda a retalho da alma portuguesa.”

“Convicções profundas só as têm as criaturas superficiais. Os que não reparam para as coisas quase que as veem apenas para não esbarrar com elas, esses são sempre da mesma opinião, são os íntegros e os coerentes. A política e a religião gastam dessa lenha, e é por isso que ardem tão mal entre a Verdade e a Vida.”

“O futuro de Portugal - que não calculo, mas sei - está escrito já, para quem saiba lê-lo, nas trovas de Bandarra, e também nas quadras de Nostradamus. Esse futuro é sermos tudo. Quem, que seja português, pode viver a estreiteza de uma só personalidade, de uma só nação, de uma só fé?”

“É preciso que todos os que lidam comigo se convençam de que sou assim, e que exigir-me os sentimentos, aliás muito dignos, de um homem vulgar e banal, é como exigir-me que tenha olhos azuis e cabelo louro.”

“Tenho por irmãos os criadores da consciência do mundo - o dramaturgo atabalhoado W. Shakespeare, o mestre-escola J. Milton, o vadio Dante Alighieri, e, até, se a citação se permite, aquele Jesus Cristo que não foi nada no mundo... O que escrevo hoje é muito melhor do que o poderiam escrever os melhores.”

“Organizar em perfeito paralelismo a minha vida prática e a minha vida especulativa, de modo a que a primeira nunca possa prejudicar a segunda, à qual está, por um dever mais alto, subordinada.”

“Se eu não for a minha própria epopeia, terei vivido em vão. (...) Se em todos os meus versos não houver timbres da eternidade, terei desperdiçado o tempo dos Deuses em mim.”

“Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.”

“The letters from the ink in my pen are an absurd map of magic signs.”

“back home.. the tablecloth of civilization makes us forget the already painted pine it covers! ([50], Zenith trans.)”

“The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [...] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things.”

“L'oppio ce l'ho nell'anima.”

“Sono nato in un'epoca in cui la maggior parte dei giovani aveva perduto la fede in Dio, per la stessa ragione per la quale i loro padri l'avevano avuto - senya sapere perché. (...) Così, non sapendo credere in Dio, e non potendo credere in una somma di animali, sono rimasto, come altri a margine delle genti, in qualla distanza da tutto ciò che comunemente è chiamato Decadenza.”

“Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,Deliberately at the same time...No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!I can’t even light the next cigarette... If it’s an action,It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life.”

“12.Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir. O que confesso não tem importância, pois nada tem importânciaPor: Bernado SoaresIn: Livro do Desassossego”

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”

“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.”

“For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.”