Top 320 Quotes & Sayings by Fernando Pessoa - Page 3

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

I never meant to be but a dreamer.

Art lies because it's social.

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

Myth is the nothing that is all.

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.

Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.

Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!

I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.

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

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

Strength without agility is a mere mass.

What is art but the denial of life?

Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

Better to dream than to be.

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.

God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.

Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

Humanitarianism is rude.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

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.

Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

I know nothing and my heart aches

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.