Fernando Pessoa Quotes - Page 3

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

Contradiction is the essence of the universe.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

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.

I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.

My joy is as painful as my pain.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]

I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.