Fernando Pessoa Quotes - Page 7

Art lies because it's social.

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.

pg 9, "The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!

Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.

Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.

I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.

I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.

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 else's dream.

I don't believe in the landscape.

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

I never meant to be but a dreamer.