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It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.
Fernando Pessoa -
Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.
Fernando Pessoa
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These are Fortunate Islands, These are lands without a place
Fernando Pessoa -
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
Fernando Pessoa -
In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.
Fernando Pessoa -
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.
Fernando Pessoa -
A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today.
Fernando Pessoa -
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.
Fernando Pessoa
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At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.
Fernando Pessoa -
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.
Fernando Pessoa -
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
Fernando Pessoa -
If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.
Fernando Pessoa -
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.
Fernando Pessoa -
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Fernando Pessoa
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Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
Fernando Pessoa -
Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.
Fernando Pessoa -
'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end of the world we were seeking.
Fernando Pessoa -
Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.
Fernando Pessoa -
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Fernando Pessoa -
And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
Fernando Pessoa
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Art lies because it's social.
Fernando Pessoa -
Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
Fernando Pessoa -
We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.
Fernando Pessoa -
I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.
Fernando Pessoa