Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.

Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

Contradiction is the essence of the universe.

I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!

Myth is the nothing that is all.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.

I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.

This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.

What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

To think is to destroy.

FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.

Faithful to the word given and the idea had.

Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.

Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.

I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.

Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.

There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.

Ser compreendido é prostituir-se.

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!

My curiosity sister of larks.

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.