Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia.

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you cant live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case youre a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but youre not free. And you cant hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that youre forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.

Like every dreamer, Ive always felt that my calling was to create. Since Ive never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often Ive sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. Ive never had a knack for the active life. Ive always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; Ive always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. Ive always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldnt tell were there by sight or by touch; I didnt live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.

Im almost convinced that Im never awake. Im not sure if Im not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.

But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasnt born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

If I write what I feel, its to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when hes drunk, then Ill tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that its bad for his liver, Ill answer: Whats your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

Theres no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other peoples expense.

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.

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

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

“O multicoloured hours!… Moments like flowers, minutes like trees, O time frozen in space, time dead from space and covered by flowers, by the fragrance of flowers, and by the fragrance of the names of flowers!…”

“المرآة تعكس بدقة متناهية دون أن تخطئ ابداَ . لأنها وبكل بساطة لا تفكر”