Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Original: Passar dos fantasmas da fé para os espectros da razão é somente ser mudado de cela.

I've always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted — like all orphans — to be the object of someone's affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.

Whatever be the case, life pains me.

Strength without agility is a mere mass.

- إنت قاسية .. قاسيه .. قاسية .. لا ينقصك غير السوط .

كن حرا أولا؛ ثم طالب بالحرية

Original: A ladeira leva ao moinho, mas o esforço não leva a nada.

To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers.

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

Triste de quem é feliz !
Vive porque a vida dura.
Nada na alma lhe diz
Mais que a lição da raiz
Ter por vida a sepultura.

And now I'm sleepy, because I think – I don't know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

Come sit by my side, Lydia, on the bank of the river.
Calmly let us watch it flow, and learn
That life passes, and we are not holding hands.
(Let us hold hands)
.....
Let us hold hands no more: why should we tire ourselves?
For our pleasure, for our pain, we pass on like the river.
'Tis better to know how to pass on silently,
With no great disquiet.

The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without. There's no room on the pinnacle except for the man himself. The more perfect he is, the more complete; and the more complete, the less other.

I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.

I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.