Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't wish to be, and don't even wish to be taken for being.
Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us. [23](Zenith trans.)

May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.

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.

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future I won't be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I'll have my own kin, people who "understand" me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I'll have already died long ago. I'll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man's lot in life. Perhaps one day they'll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they've understood that, they'll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don't understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Let us not be deceived by hope, because it betrays, or by love, because it grows weary, or by life, because it satiates but does not sate, or even by death, because it brings more than you want and less than you expect.

I believe in the World as in a daisy.
Because I see it. But I don't think about it
Because thinking is not understanding…

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.

I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.

I don't know how many souls I have.
I've changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I've never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can't feel myself.

That's why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"
God knows, because he wrote it...

To be understood is to prostitute yourself.

The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.

The only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning.
It's the strangest thing of all,
Stranger than all poets' dreams
And all philosophers' thoughts,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.
Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
Things have no meaning: they have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

La música, la luz de la luna y los sueños son mis armas mágicas.