Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher (1888–1935); creator of the heteronymic system including Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares

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Fernando Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously. He wrote frequently under heteronyms, alter egos with developed personalities, biographies, jobs, habits, attitudes, addresses, etc., who sometimes quoted and interacted with each other and other people.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Alberto Caeiro • Álvaro de Campos • Ricardo Reis • Bernardo Soares

Native Name: Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Alternative Names: Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa

From Wikidata (CC0)

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life — me, so calm and peaceful?

I'm always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don't even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn't mine: it's me.

As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

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.

تحملين زهرة في يدك / قطفتها، بلا انتباه... / لكن، هل قطفت / قلبي، بانتباه؟

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…