Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

“Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but theres no palace till its built.”

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

“At first, its unfamiliar, then it strikes root.”

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

“Look, theres no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.”

“To feel today what one felt yesterday isnt to feel - its to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be todays living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.”

“Whoever, when he dies, leaves on paper a beautiful line of poetry has left the heavens richer and the earth too.”

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

“All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.”

“God wills, Man dreams, the Work is born.”

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

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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.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

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.

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.

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!

A trees shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a trees shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasnt understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we dont even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation thats superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. Its a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.

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