Fernando Pessoa
It's been a long time since I've been me.Collection: Time
In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.Collection: Stupid
Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.Collection: Destiny
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.Collection: Heart
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.Collection: Order
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.Collection: Pain
To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.Collection: Thinking
There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.Collection: Regret
Literature exists because the world isn't enough.Collection: Literature
My past is everything I failed to be.Collection: Failure
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.Collection: Beautiful
I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respectCollection: Taken
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.Collection: Life
I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.Collection: Waking
Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.Collection: Hold Me
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.Collection: Life
Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.Collection: Mistake
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.Collection: Past
To be understood is to prostitute oneselfCollection: Understood
I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.Collection: Missing
Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]Collection: Morning
Life is good, but Wine is better.Collection: Wine
And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.Collection: Thinking
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.Collection: Mean
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.Collection: Change
Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal?Collection: Sea
If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.Collection: Grief
Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?Collection: Men
Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.Collection: Giving
To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.Collection: Opinion
Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.Collection: Looks
For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.Collection: Height
I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.Collection: Book
The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.Collection: Sea
I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.Collection: Success
Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.Collection: Blessed
Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.Collection: Talking
We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.Collection: Desire
I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.Collection: Thinking
I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.Collection: Taste
God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.Collection: Mirrors
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. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.Collection: 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.Collection: Dream
Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.Collection: Dream
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.Collection: Love
My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.Collection: Soul
Property isn't theft: it's nothing.Collection: Theft
All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.Collection: Mean
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 soulCollection: Dream