I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.
Fernando PessoaI'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
Fernando PessoaWe, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.
Fernando PessoaI'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.
Fernando PessoaThe idea of any social obligation ... just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.
Fernando PessoaOne or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.
Fernando PessoaBut I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.
Fernando PessoaWe’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.
Fernando PessoaEverything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.
Fernando PessoaBut my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.
Fernando PessoaIf life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.
Fernando PessoaI don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
Fernando PessoaI sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.
Fernando PessoaGiving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
Fernando PessoaI’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
Fernando PessoaEverything 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.
Fernando PessoaWe almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.
Fernando PessoaInch 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.
Fernando PessoaI had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.
Fernando PessoaMy hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.
Fernando PessoaWhat can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet
Fernando PessoaI asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.
Fernando PessoaLife is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
Fernando PessoaTomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.
Fernando PessoaThe superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.
Fernando PessoaWe never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
Fernando PessoaTo have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
Fernando PessoaThe 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.
Fernando PessoaI am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.
Fernando PessoaNo intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa