Fernando Pessoa Quotes

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

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

It's been a long time since I've been me.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

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

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

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, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

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.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

Strength without agility is a mere mass.

I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

My past is everything I failed to be.