Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people.

I know not what tomorrow will bring

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.

Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams.

Original: O mito é o nada que é tudo.

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

Original: Adoramos a perfeição, porque não a podemos ter; repugná-la-íamos, se a tivéssemos. O perfeito é o desumano, porque o humano é imperfeito.

The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people's burdensome emotions!

لا وجود لأي امبراطورية تستحق أن تمزق لأجلها دمية طفلة. لا يوجد مثال يستحق أن نضحي في سبيله حتى بقطار ألعاب. أوثمة بلاد أنفع من أخرى ومثل أسمى من سواها؟ ...... أمام الحياة التي امتلكناها بدون أن نعرف كيف، وسنفقدها بدون أن نعرف متى، أمام العشرة آلاف لعبة شطرنج التي هي الحياة، إزاء ضجر التأمل الذي لا طائل من ورائه لما لا يتحقق أبدا... أمام كل هذا ماذا باستطاعة الحكيم أن يفعل سوى أن يطلب العطالة والراحة

Original: Digo-o porque não acredito.

We 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.

Life is what we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man who possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life's reality.

This has nothing to do with anything.

I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist. I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul's body. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?

The sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness