Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day theyโre full of meaningless activity; by night, theyโre full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things
Fernando PessoaI suffer from life and from other people. I canโt 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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful โ only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando PessoaTo live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.
Fernando PessoaSuccess consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.
Fernando PessoaTo feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
Fernando PessoaThat is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.
Fernando Pessoa