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Fernando Pessoa
206 quotes
“Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“… 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.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 40
“Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p 229
“Strength without agility is a mere mass.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fraternity has subtleties.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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!”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Os Grandes Trechos, s/n. Translated from the Portuguese Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006
“To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 70
“For I am the size of what I see not my height's size.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed to the Caeiro alter ego, in A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 71
“In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73
“Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You breathe better when you're rich.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My joy is as painful as my pain.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source