Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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.

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!

We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIts the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.

Again I see you, But me I dont 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!...

Isnt joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,Deliberately at the same time...No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!I can’t even light the next cigarette... If it’s an action,It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life.

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 me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.

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 elses dream.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From whats in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but theres always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

My past is everything I failed to be.

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... Ive written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once Ive perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, Im forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself.

I am nothing.Ill never be anything.I couldnt want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

Ah, its my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

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.

The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.