Fernando Pessoa Quotes

If the heart could think it would stop beating.

All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn’t be love letters if they were not Ridiculous.

I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writin...

I am nothing.I'll never be anything.I couldn't want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me al...

The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even ima...

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thi...

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing f...

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and ...

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whateve...

To pretend is to know oneself.

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!To be remiss is to be positively out in the c...

To be understood is to prostitute oneself

Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And ...

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Pu...

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of n...

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean ...

I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems on...

By day I am nothing, by night I am I.

I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contem...

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I...

That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability ...

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts tha...

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not t...

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is ...

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to tra...

Anonymous > Quotes > Quotable Quote“I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coac...

It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from everyone. There are serious matters in life to ...

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the ke...

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’v...

I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to b...

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

...And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel ...

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insa...

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discour...

Action disconcerts us, partly because of our physical incompetence, but mainly because it offends ou...

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming,...

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what...

I’m curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not every...

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even m...

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I fe...

From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts a...

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ...

I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and...

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion i...

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well onl...

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the vis...

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to...

And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, jus...

There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other peop...

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the ...

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness o...

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing ...

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in...

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of...

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away i...

Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our...

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think ...

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live with...

Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see...

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within mys...

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and ...

My past is everything I failed to be.

Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to ma...

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! T...

I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever w...

Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his co...

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because ...

I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my se...

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling th...

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our...

A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while ...

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the wither...

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynam...

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote t...

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this...

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whateve...

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two date...

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground ...

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate n...

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why ...

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analys...

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it

We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we have...

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early...

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible la...

everything is absurd.1 man spends his life earning money which he then saves even though he has no c...

I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I've sought – as my own version of th...

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. P...

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to ...