Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. — The book of Disquiet

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

I'm nothing,
I'll always be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dreams inside me.

Original: Não o prazer, não a glória, não o poder: a liberdade, unicamente a liberdade.

My 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.

Original: O império supremo é o do Imperador que abdica de toda a vida normal, dos outros homens, em quem o cuidado da supremacia não pesa como um fardo de jóias.

Original: Sim, falar com gente dá-me vontade de dormir.

Original: Se eu tivesse escrito o Rei Lear, levaria com remorsos toda a minha vida de depois. Porque essa obra é tão grande, que enormes avultam os seus defeitos, os seus monstruosos defeitos, as coisas até mínimas que estão entre certas cenas e a perfeição possível delas. Não é o sol com manchas; é uma estátua grega partida.

Agir, eis a inteligência verdadeira. Serei o que quiser. Mas tenho que querer o que for. O êxito está em ter êxito, e não em ter condições de êxito. Condições de palácio tem qualquer terra larga, mas onde estará o palácio se o não fizerem ali?

A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he's concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.

Todo se me evapora. Mi vida entera, mis recuerdos, mi imaginación y lo que contiene, mi personalidad, todo se me evapora. Continuamente siento que he sido otro, que he sentido otro, que he pensado otro. Aquello a lo que asisto es un espectáculo con otro escenario. Y aquello a lo que asisto soy yo

Original: Sou todas essa coisas, embora o não queira, no fundo confuso da minha sensibilidade fatal.

I am nothing,
Never shall be anything.
Cannot will to be anything,
This apart, I have in me, all the dreams of the world.

I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

Everything, except boredom, bores me. I'd like, without being calm, to calm down,
To take life every day
Like a medicine — One of those medicines everybody takes.

I aspired to so much, dreamed so much, That so much so much made me into nothing.
My hands grew cold
From just waiting for the enchantment
Of the love that would warm them up at last.

Cold, empty
Hands.