Top 320 Quotes & Sayings by Fernando Pessoa

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root.

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

Life is good, but Wine is better.

It's been a long time since I've been me.

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.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Everything is theater.

Literature exists because the world isn't enough.

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves

I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

My past is everything I failed to be.

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful

Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.