Fernando Pessoa

“What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.”

“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.”

“When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.”

“I'm always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice.”

“Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha. É a minha maneira de estar sózinho.”

“I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.”

“To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.”

“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”

“I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.”

“Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.”

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”

“I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.”

“pg 9, "The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.”

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

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

“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.”

“To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.”

“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.I was never convinced of what I believed in.I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.Words were my only truth.When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”

“I Know, I AloneI know, I aloneHow much it hurts, this heartWith no faith nor lawNor melody nor thought.Only I, only IAnd none of this can I sayBecause feeling is like the sky -Seen, nothing in it to see.”

“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?”

“A liberdade é a possibilidade do isolamento. Se te é impossível viver só, nasceste escravo.”

“Deus quer, o homem sonha, a obra nasce.”

“Multipliquei-me para me sentir.”

“Come chocolates, pequena;Come chocolates!Olha que não há mais metafísica no mundo senão chocolates.Olha que as religiões todas não ensinam mais que a confeitaria.”

“Every gesture is a revolutionary act. ”

“Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…”

“A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?”

“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.”

“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”

“After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.”

“To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)”

“Nunca amamos a nadie: amamos, sólo, la idea que tenemos de alguien. Lo que amamos es un concepto nuestro, es decir, a nosotros mismos.”

“We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.”

“The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!”

“Amo como ama o amor. Não conheço nenhuma outra razão para amar senão amar. Que queres que te diga, além de que te amo, se o que quero dizer-te é que te amo?”

“To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.”

“Ese episodio de la imaginación al que llamamos realidad”

“Mar PortuguêsÓ mar salgado, quanto do teu salSão lágrimas de Portugal!Por te cruzarmos, quantas mães choraram,Quantos filhos em vão rezaram!Quantas noivas ficaram por casarPara que fosses nosso, ó mar!Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a penaSe a alma não é pequena.Quem quere passar além do BojadorTem que passar além da dor.Deus ao mar o perigo e o abismo deu,Mas nele é que espelhou o céu.”

“Escravos cardíacos das estrelas, Conquistámos todo o mundo antes de nos levantar da cama; Mas acordámos e ele é opaco, Levantámo-nos e ele é alheio, Saímos de casa e ele é a terra inteira, Mais o sistema solar e a Via Láctea e o Indefinido.”

“Não sou nada.Nunca serei nada.Não posso querer ser nada.À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.”

“O poeta é um fingidor. Finge tão completamente Que chega a fingir que é dor A dor que deveras sente.”

“This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“I am nothing.I'll never be anything.I couldn't want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”

“If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.”

“To be understood is to prostitute oneself”

“There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness”

“Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice”

“We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.”

“Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?”