Fernando Pessoa Quotes
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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.
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What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought.
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Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.
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Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.
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We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.
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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.
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My homeland is the portuguese language.
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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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What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
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Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
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Repudiei sempre que me compreendessem. Ser compreendido é prostituir-se. Prefiro ser tomado a sério como o que não sou, ignorado humanamente, com decência e naturalidade.
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To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. ... Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations?Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are.
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All beginnings are involuntary.
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Art lies because it's social.
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Everything is absurd.
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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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There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.
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Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.
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Strength without agility is a mere mass.
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I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.
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Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
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Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.
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A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today.
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I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.