Fernando Pessoa
Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoiceCollection: Pain
FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.Collection: Dream
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.Collection: Dark
Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.Collection: Moving
I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.Collection: Hours
The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.Collection: Pain
Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.Collection: Believe
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.Collection: Wrinkles
I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.Collection: Errors
Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.Collection: Beautiful
I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.Collection: Sirens
Wasting time has an esthetics to it.Collection: Wasting Time
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.Collection: Hurt
I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.Collection: Flower
Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.Collection: Novelty
And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.Collection: Hate
It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.Collection: Sea
Let’s buy books so as not to read them; let’s go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who’s there; let’s take long walks because we’re sick of walking; and let’s spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.Collection: Country
I’d like to be in the country so that I’d could like being in the city.Collection: Country