Fernando Pessoa Quotes
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Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.
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To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
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I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.
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Who wants to go beyond the Bojador Must go beyond pain.
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What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
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Here lies, on the small farthest beach,the Captain of the End.
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It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.
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Fingir é conhecer-se.
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What is art but the denial of life?
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The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!
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There's a tiredness of abstract intelligence, 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.
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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.
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My head and the universe ache me.
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Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
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It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.
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Pity him who lives at homeHappy with his life,Without a dream, a flexing of wings,To make him relinquishEven the warmest ember of his hearth!Pity him who is happy!He lives because life lasts.Nothing within him whispersMore than the primeval law:That life leads to the grave.
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My joy is as painful as my pain.
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The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.
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Art lies because it's social.
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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.
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Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
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Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.
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I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.
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Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.