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Fernando Pessoa Quotes about Sleep

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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

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.

Fernando Pessoa
Dream, Tired, Sleep
Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.70, Profile Books

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

Fernando Pessoa
Sleep, Essence, Desire
Fernando Pessoa (1996). “The Book of Disquietude: By Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon”

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.

Fernando Pessoa
Dream, Sleep, Thinking

Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am.

Fernando Pessoa
Rain, Fall, Sleep
Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.63, Penguin UK

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

Fernando Pessoa
Children, Sleep, Men

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

Fernando Pessoa
Dream, Sleep, Awake
Fernando Pessoa, Edwin Honig, Susan M. Brown (1986). “The Poems of Fernando Pessoa”, New York : Ecco Press

The idea of any social obligation ... just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.

Fernando Pessoa
Real, Sleep, Ideas
"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, 1982.

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

Fernando Pessoa
Dream, Real, Sleep
Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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