Fernando Pessoa
Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.Collection: Men
I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.Collection: Want
I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.Collection: Tired
I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!Collection: Men
The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.Collection: Sleep
Everything is theater.Collection: Theater
Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.Collection: Wise
In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.Collection: Spirit
These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.Collection: Writing
I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.Collection: Dream
My curiosity sister of larks.Collection: Curiosity
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. From, The Book of DisquietCollection: Dream
The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.Collection: Dream
Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.Collection: Taken
The Gods sell when they give. Glory is paid for with disgrace. Poor are the happy, for they are Just what passes.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Brain
Fraternity has subtleties.Collection: Fraternity
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Yesterday
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.Collection: Effort
pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.Collection: Heart
The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.Collection: Emotional
What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.Collection: Book
Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.Collection: Dream
To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.Collection: Just Being
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?Collection: Heaven
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.Collection: Dream
If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginingsCollection: Dream
The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.Collection: Ends
Everything is absurd.Collection: Absurd
We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.Collection: Another Life
Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.Collection: Destiny
Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.Collection: Noble
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.Collection: Eye
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.Collection: Heart
I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.Collection: Writing
To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.Collection: Mistake
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.Collection: Blood
The idea of any social obligation ... just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.Collection: Real
I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.Collection: Desks
If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.Collection: Writing
And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.Collection: Dream
God wills, man dreams, the work is born.Collection: Dream
To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character - all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Dream
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.Collection: Impossible Things
If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.Collection: Kings
We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.Collection: Vanity
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.Collection: Solitude