Fernando Pessoa
We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.Collection: Sky
And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.Collection: Hate
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.Collection: Dream
Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.Collection: Imagination
Life is a thread that someone entangled.Collection: Life Is
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.Collection: Dream
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.Collection: Dream
If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.Collection: Ifs
To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.Collection: Inspirational
Contradiction is the essence of the universe.Collection: Essence
The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.Collection: Art
The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.Collection: Dream
Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.Collection: Swamps
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.)Collection: Betrayal
But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?Collection: Knowing
I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.Collection: Art
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.Collection: Race
There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.Collection: Worry
I know nothing and my heart achesCollection: Heart
I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.Collection: Dream
I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.Collection: Humanity
Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.Collection: Slave
A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.Collection: Strong
Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Who I Am
Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.Collection: Ego
I don't believe in the landscape.Collection: Believe
Better to dream than to be.Collection: Dream
Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.Collection: Art
The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their ownCollection: Strange
There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Dream
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.Collection: Dream
I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Dream
I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.Collection: Victory
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.Collection: Thinking
I never meant to be but a dreamer.Collection: Dreamer
What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.Collection: Dream
We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.Collection: Chaos
It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.Collection: Reality
Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do DesassossegoCollection: Thinking
I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.Collection: Numbness
When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. 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
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!Collection: Might
The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.Collection: Reality
Strength without agility is a mere mass.Collection: Agility
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Thinking