Fernando Pessoa Quotes - Page 9

Myth is the nothing that is all.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved... I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.

But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.

I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.

All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

Property isn't theft: it's nothing.

I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.

What is art but the denial of life?

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Humanitarianism is rude.

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.