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 worldโs existence. All these half-tones of the soulโs consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Fernando PessoaAll Iโve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing Iโve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.
Fernando PessoaOn the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.
Fernando PessoaTo say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming โ like worms when a rock is lifted โ under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Fernando Pessoa