Fernando Pessoa Quotes

I suffer from life and from other people. I can't look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

All I ever asked of life was that it should pass me by without my even noticing it.

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it.

Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.

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.

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

The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [...] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things.

Tudo vale a pena quando a alma não é pequena

If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.

In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.

Isto está tudo decadente: já nem decadentes há.

And I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.

The usual sounds are all strange, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are kings at last. This is what we all truly long to be, and the most plebeian among us perhaps more ardently than those full of false gold. For a moment we are the universe's pensioners, recipients of a steady income, with no needs and no worries.

Original: O mundo é de quem não sente. A condição essencial para se ser um homem prático é a ausência de sensibilidade.