Fernando Pessoa quotes:

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

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.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

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

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.

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 look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.

I don't believe in the landscape.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.

I know nothing and my heart aches

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.

In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.

I am the escaped one, After I was born They locked me up inside me But I left. My soul seeks me, Through hills and valley, I hope my soul Never finds me.

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.

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.

THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore...

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.

My past is everything I failed to be.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

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.

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.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

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.

The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.

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

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.

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 know not what tomorrow will bring.

At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root.

I don't complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.

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!

Les dieux sont ceux qui ne doutent jamais.

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

By day I am nothing, by night I am I.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.

Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.

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

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

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.

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

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

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

I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

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.

It's been a long time since I've been me.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist.

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.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

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

And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

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

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'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

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

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

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

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

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

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

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.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?

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

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

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

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.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

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.

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

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

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

And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

I wasn't meant for reality, but life came and found me.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.