Fernando Pessoa Quotes - Page 6

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. 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 be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own

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!

Better to dream than to be.

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.

I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.

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.

Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

All beginnings are involuntary.

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.

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. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

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

The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

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

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.

Strength without agility is a mere mass.