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












Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

More Fernando Pessoa quotes
"Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
"The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
"I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly re...
"I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone...
"There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into...
"To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as...
"Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; t...
"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and w...