Fernando Pessoa Quotes - Page 2

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

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

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

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

The human soul is an abyss

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Life is good, but Wine is better.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Literature exists because the world isn't enough.

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

My past is everything I failed to be.

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.