Top 320 Quotes & Sayings by Fernando Pessoa - Page 6

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

All beginnings are involuntary.

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

You breathe better when you're rich.

To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character - all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.

God wills, man dreams, the work is born.