--- title: "Fernando Pessoa Quotes | QuotesBy.net" description: "Fernando Pessoa speaks in a reflective, sly way that explores identity and reality. Read and share all 173 quotes by Fernando Pessoa, collected on QuotesBy.net." image: "https://quotesby.net/wp-content/themes/quotesby-editorial/assets/og-default.png" --- ## Fernando Pessoa quotes 1. > The Gods sell when they give. / Glory is paid for with disgrace. / Poor are the happy, for they are / Just what passes. [Permalink to quote \#1](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/1/ "Permalink to quote 1") 2. > Myth is the nothing that is all. [Permalink to quote \#2](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/2/ "Permalink to quote 2") 3. > All beginnings are unvoluntary. [Permalink to quote \#3](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/3/ "Permalink to quote 3") 4. > I fulfilled my duty against destiny. / Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it. [Permalink to quote \#4](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/4/ "Permalink to quote 4") 5. > Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, / and clear in wanting [Permalink to quote \#5](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/5/ "Permalink to quote 5") 6. > Faithful to the word given and the idea had. / All else is up to God! [Permalink to quote \#6](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/6/ "Permalink to quote 6") 7. > Without madness what is man / more than the healthy beast, / corpse adjourned that procreates? [Permalink to quote \#7](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/7/ "Permalink to quote 7") 8. > God wills, man dreams, the work is born. [Permalink to quote \#8](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/8/ "Permalink to quote 8") 9. > The sea is fulfilled, and the Empire undid itself. / Lord, Portugal remains to be accomplished! [Permalink to quote \#9](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/9/ "Permalink to quote 9") 10. > The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: / the endless sea is portuguese. [Permalink to quote \#10](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/10/ "Permalink to quote 10") 11. > Here lies, in the small extreme beach, the Captain Of The End. [Permalink to quote \#11](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/11/ "Permalink to quote 11") 12. > Oh salty sea, how much of your salt / is tears from Portugal [Permalink to quote \#12](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/12/ "Permalink to quote 12") 13. > Everything is worthwhile / if the soul isn't small. [Permalink to quote \#13](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/13/ "Permalink to quote 13") 14. > Who wants to go beyond the Bojador / Must go beyond pain. [Permalink to quote \#14](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/14/ "Permalink to quote 14") 15. > God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, / but it was in it that He mirrored the sky. [Permalink to quote \#15](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/15/ "Permalink to quote 15") 16. > These are Fortunate Islands, / These are lands without a place [Permalink to quote \#16](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/16/ "Permalink to quote 16") 17. > Oh Portugal, today you are fog... [Permalink to quote \#17](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/17/ "Permalink to quote 17") 18. > Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods. [Permalink to quote \#18](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/18/ "Permalink to quote 18") 19. > ... 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. [Permalink to quote \#19](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/19/ "Permalink to quote 19") 20. > I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing. [Permalink to quote \#20](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/20/ "Permalink to quote 20") 21. > Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows. [Permalink to quote \#21](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/21/ "Permalink to quote 21") 22. > Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes. [Permalink to quote \#22](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/22/ "Permalink to quote 22") 23. > Strenght without agility is a mere mass. [Permalink to quote \#23](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/23/ "Permalink to quote 23") 24. > There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world. [Permalink to quote \#24](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/24/ "Permalink to quote 24") 25. > I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life. [Permalink to quote \#25](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/25/ "Permalink to quote 25") 26. > We are two abysses -- a well staring at the sky. [Permalink to quote \#26](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/26/ "Permalink to quote 26") 27. > A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today. [Permalink to quote \#27](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/27/ "Permalink to quote 27") 28. > The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodre. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion. [Permalink to quote \#28](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/28/ "Permalink to quote 28") 29. > We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are. [Permalink to quote \#29](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/29/ "Permalink to quote 29") 30. > Fraternity has subtleties. [Permalink to quote \#30](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/30/ "Permalink to quote 30") 31. > I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror. [Permalink to quote \#31](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/31/ "Permalink to quote 31") 32. > I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said. [Permalink to quote \#32](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/32/ "Permalink to quote 32") 33. > I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility. [Permalink to quote \#33](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/33/ "Permalink to quote 33") 34. > I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling. [Permalink to quote \#34](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/34/ "Permalink to quote 34") 35. > 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! [Permalink to quote \#35](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/35/ "Permalink to quote 35") 36. > I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by. [Permalink to quote \#36](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/36/ "Permalink to quote 36") 37. > Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake. [Permalink to quote \#37](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/37/ "Permalink to quote 37") 38. > Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom. [Permalink to quote \#38](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/38/ "Permalink to quote 38") 39. > Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells. [Permalink to quote \#39](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/39/ "Permalink to quote 39") 40. > Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life. [Permalink to quote \#40](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/40/ "Permalink to quote 40") 41. > It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was. [Permalink to quote \#41](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/41/ "Permalink to quote 41") 42. > As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes. [Permalink to quote \#42](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/42/ "Permalink to quote 42") 43. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#43](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/43/ "Permalink to quote 43") 44. > Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day \[...\] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being. [Permalink to quote \#44](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/44/ "Permalink to quote 44") 45. > To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers. [Permalink to quote \#45](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/45/ "Permalink to quote 45") 46. > For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size. [Permalink to quote \#46](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/46/ "Permalink to quote 46") 47. > In order to understand, I destroyed myself. [Permalink to quote \#47](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/47/ "Permalink to quote 47") 48. > Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me. [Permalink to quote \#48](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/48/ "Permalink to quote 48") 49. > Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy. [Permalink to quote \#49](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/49/ "Permalink to quote 49") 50. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#50](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/50/ "Permalink to quote 50") 51. > The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races. [Permalink to quote \#51](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/51/ "Permalink to quote 51") 52. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#52](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/52/ "Permalink to quote 52") 53. > I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner. [Permalink to quote \#53](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/53/ "Permalink to quote 53") 54. > It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living. [Permalink to quote \#54](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/54/ "Permalink to quote 54") 55. > Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one. [Permalink to quote \#55](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/55/ "Permalink to quote 55") 56. > Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul. [Permalink to quote \#56](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/56/ "Permalink to quote 56") 57. > I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading? [Permalink to quote \#57](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/57/ "Permalink to quote 57") 58. > Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities. [Permalink to quote \#58](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/58/ "Permalink to quote 58") 59. > The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax. [Permalink to quote \#59](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/59/ "Permalink to quote 59") 60. > A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside. [Permalink to quote \#60](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/60/ "Permalink to quote 60") 61. > What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought. [Permalink to quote \#61](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/61/ "Permalink to quote 61") 62. > You breathe better when you're rich. [Permalink to quote \#62](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/62/ "Permalink to quote 62") 63. > I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom. [Permalink to quote \#63](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/63/ "Permalink to quote 63") 64. > Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly. [Permalink to quote \#64](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/64/ "Permalink to quote 64") 65. > My joy is as painful as my pain. [Permalink to quote \#65](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/65/ "Permalink to quote 65") 66. > Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it. [Permalink to quote \#66](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/66/ "Permalink to quote 66") 67. > My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt. [Permalink to quote \#67](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/67/ "Permalink to quote 67") 68. > My life is as if you've hit me with it. [Permalink to quote \#68](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/68/ "Permalink to quote 68") 69. > If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts. [Permalink to quote \#69](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/69/ "Permalink to quote 69") 70. > They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it. [Permalink to quote \#70](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/70/ "Permalink to quote 70") 71. > The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man. [Permalink to quote \#71](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/71/ "Permalink to quote 71") 72. > I never meant to be but a dreamer. [Permalink to quote \#72](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/72/ "Permalink to quote 72") 73. > There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were. [Permalink to quote \#73](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/73/ "Permalink to quote 73") 74. > I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have. [Permalink to quote \#74](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/74/ "Permalink to quote 74") 75. > The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels. [Permalink to quote \#75](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/75/ "Permalink to quote 75") 76. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#76](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/76/ "Permalink to quote 76") 77. > To act is to rest. [Permalink to quote \#77](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/77/ "Permalink to quote 77") 78. > All problemas are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be. [Permalink to quote \#78](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/78/ "Permalink to quote 78") 79. > His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so. [Permalink to quote \#79](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/79/ "Permalink to quote 79") 80. > We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love. [Permalink to quote \#80](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/80/ "Permalink to quote 80") 81. > To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life. [Permalink to quote \#81](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/81/ "Permalink to quote 81") 82. > Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools. [Permalink to quote \#82](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/82/ "Permalink to quote 82") 83. > To be understood is to prostitute yourself. [Permalink to quote \#83](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/83/ "Permalink to quote 83") 84. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#84](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/84/ "Permalink to quote 84") 85. > 'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end of the world we were seeking. [Permalink to quote \#85](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/85/ "Permalink to quote 85") 86. > It's been a long time since I've been me. [Permalink to quote \#86](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/86/ "Permalink to quote 86") 87. > Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches. [Permalink to quote \#87](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/87/ "Permalink to quote 87") 88. > What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them. [Permalink to quote \#88](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/88/ "Permalink to quote 88") 89. > The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified. [Permalink to quote \#89](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/89/ "Permalink to quote 89") 90. > The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man. [Permalink to quote \#90](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/90/ "Permalink to quote 90") 91. > Nature is the difference between the soul and God. [Permalink to quote \#91](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/91/ "Permalink to quote 91") 92. > There is no safe standard to tell man from animals. [Permalink to quote \#92](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/92/ "Permalink to quote 92") 93. > Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious. [Permalink to quote \#93](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/93/ "Permalink to quote 93") 94. > Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine. [Permalink to quote \#94](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/94/ "Permalink to quote 94") 95. > I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me. [Permalink to quote \#95](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/95/ "Permalink to quote 95") 96. > Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination. [Permalink to quote \#96](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/96/ "Permalink to quote 96") 97. > Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men. [Permalink to quote \#97](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/97/ "Permalink to quote 97") 98. > To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived. [Permalink to quote \#98](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/98/ "Permalink to quote 98") 99. > I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague. [Permalink to quote \#99](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/99/ "Permalink to quote 99") 100. > The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere. [Permalink to quote \#100](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/100/ "Permalink to quote 100") 101. > Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming. [Permalink to quote \#101](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/101/ "Permalink to quote 101") 102. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#102](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/102/ "Permalink to quote 102") 103. > What is art but the denial of life? [Permalink to quote \#103](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/103/ "Permalink to quote 103") 104. > Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it. [Permalink to quote \#104](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/104/ "Permalink to quote 104") 105. > To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing. [Permalink to quote \#105](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/105/ "Permalink to quote 105") 106. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#106](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/106/ "Permalink to quote 106") 107. > Enthusiasm is rude. [Permalink to quote \#107](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/107/ "Permalink to quote 107") 108. > My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me? [Permalink to quote \#108](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/108/ "Permalink to quote 108") 109. > Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major. [Permalink to quote \#109](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/109/ "Permalink to quote 109") 110. > My curiosity sister of larks. [Permalink to quote \#110](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/110/ "Permalink to quote 110") 111. > If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as. [Permalink to quote \#111](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/111/ "Permalink to quote 111") 112. > My homeland is the portuguese language. [Permalink to quote \#112](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/112/ "Permalink to quote 112") 113. > Art consists in making others feel what we feel. [Permalink to quote \#113](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/113/ "Permalink to quote 113") 114. > Art lies because it's social. [Permalink to quote \#114](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/114/ "Permalink to quote 114") 115. > Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect. [Permalink to quote \#115](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/115/ "Permalink to quote 115") 116. > Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious. [Permalink to quote \#116](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/116/ "Permalink to quote 116") 117. > Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman. [Permalink to quote \#117](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/117/ "Permalink to quote 117") 118. > It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering. [Permalink to quote \#118](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/118/ "Permalink to quote 118") 119. > Liberty is the possibility of isolation. [Permalink to quote \#119](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/119/ "Permalink to quote 119") 120. > If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave. [Permalink to quote \#120](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/120/ "Permalink to quote 120") 121. > And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust. [Permalink to quote \#121](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/121/ "Permalink to quote 121") 122. > We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect. [Permalink to quote \#122](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/122/ "Permalink to quote 122") 123. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#123](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/123/ "Permalink to quote 123") 124. > For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain. [Permalink to quote \#124](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/124/ "Permalink to quote 124") 125. > All is absurd. [Permalink to quote \#125](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/125/ "Permalink to quote 125") 126. > The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity. [Permalink to quote \#126](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/126/ "Permalink to quote 126") 127. > What would happen to the world if we were human? [Permalink to quote \#127](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/127/ "Permalink to quote 127") 128. > Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins. [Permalink to quote \#128](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/128/ "Permalink to quote 128") 129. > Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary. [Permalink to quote \#129](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/129/ "Permalink to quote 129") 130. > All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does. [Permalink to quote \#130](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/130/ "Permalink to quote 130") 131. > I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. \[...\] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables! [Permalink to quote \#131](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/131/ "Permalink to quote 131") 132. > For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about whatever unimportant and curious is going on. / \[...\] The supreme honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic. / All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things, of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take an interest in others in order to take care of himself. [Permalink to quote \#132](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/132/ "Permalink to quote 132") 133. > Wasting time has an esthetics to it. [Permalink to quote \#133](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/133/ "Permalink to quote 133") 134. > I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing. [Permalink to quote \#134](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/134/ "Permalink to quote 134") 135. > It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended. [Permalink to quote \#135](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/135/ "Permalink to quote 135") 136. > Every gesture is a revolutionary act. [Permalink to quote \#136](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/136/ "Permalink to quote 136") 137. > Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams. [Permalink to quote \#137](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/137/ "Permalink to quote 137") 138. > Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions. [Permalink to quote \#138](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/138/ "Permalink to quote 138") 139. > And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true. // And when lying starts giving us pleasure, let's speak the truth so that we lie to it. [Permalink to quote \#139](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/139/ "Permalink to quote 139") 140. > My head and the universe ache me. [Permalink to quote \#140](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/140/ "Permalink to quote 140") 141. > Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches. [Permalink to quote \#141](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/141/ "Permalink to quote 141") 142. > Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it. [Permalink to quote \#142](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/142/ "Permalink to quote 142") 143. > I don't believe in the landscape. [Permalink to quote \#143](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/143/ "Permalink to quote 143") 144. > I say it because I don't believe. [Permalink to quote \#144](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/144/ "Permalink to quote 144") 145. > When I write, I solemnly visit myself. [Permalink to quote \#145](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/145/ "Permalink to quote 145") 146. > Life is a thread that someone entangled. [Permalink to quote \#146](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/146/ "Permalink to quote 146") 147. > They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had. [Permalink to quote \#147](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/147/ "Permalink to quote 147") 148. > Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd. [Permalink to quote \#148](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/148/ "Permalink to quote 148") 149. > I exempt you of being present in my idea of you. [Permalink to quote \#149](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/149/ "Permalink to quote 149") 150. > That's not my love; that's just your life. [Permalink to quote \#150](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/150/ "Permalink to quote 150") 151. > And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream. [Permalink to quote \#151](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/151/ "Permalink to quote 151") 152. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#152](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/152/ "Permalink to quote 152") 153. > I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself. [Permalink to quote \#153](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/153/ "Permalink to quote 153") 154. > To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. \[...\] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations? // Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are. [Permalink to quote \#154](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/154/ "Permalink to quote 154") 155. > I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city. [Permalink to quote \#155](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/155/ "Permalink to quote 155") 156. > Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes. [Permalink to quote \#156](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/156/ "Permalink to quote 156") 157. > 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. [Permalink to quote \#157](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/157/ "Permalink to quote 157") 158. > I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality. [Permalink to quote \#158](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/158/ "Permalink to quote 158") 159. > Humanitarianim is rude. [Permalink to quote \#159](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/159/ "Permalink to quote 159") 160. > Property isn't theft: it's nothing. [Permalink to quote \#160](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/160/ "Permalink to quote 160") 161. > To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character -- all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external. [Permalink to quote \#161](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/161/ "Permalink to quote 161") 162. > De sonhar ninguem se cansa, porque sonhar e esquecer, e esquecer nao pesa e e um sono sem sonhos em que estamos despertos. [Permalink to quote \#162](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/162/ "Permalink to quote 162") 163. > Primeiro estranha-se, depois entranha-se. [Permalink to quote \#163](https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa/163/ "Permalink to quote 163") ## Also attributed 1. > 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. 2. > What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him. 3. > pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation. 4. > 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. 5. > I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. 6. > I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. 7. > 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. 8. > 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. 9. > I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am. 10. > 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. ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "CollectionPage", "name": "Fernando Pessoa Quotes", "url": "https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa", "about": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" }, "hasPart": [ { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "The Gods sell when they give. / Glory is paid for with disgrace. / Poor are the happy, for they are / Just what passes.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Myth is the nothing that is all.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "All beginnings are unvoluntary.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "I fulfilled my duty against destiny. / Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, / and clear in wanting", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Faithful to the word given and the idea had. / All else is up to God!", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Without madness what is man / more than the healthy beast, / corpse adjourned that procreates?", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "God wills, man dreams, the work is born.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "The sea is fulfilled, and the Empire undid itself. / Lord, Portugal remains to be accomplished!", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: / the endless sea is portuguese.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Here lies, in the small extreme beach, the Captain Of The End.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Oh salty sea, how much of your salt / is tears from Portugal", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Everything is worthwhile / if the soul isn't small.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Who wants to go beyond the Bojador / Must go beyond pain.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, / but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "These are Fortunate Islands, / These are lands without a place", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Oh Portugal, today you are fog...", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "... 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.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } }, { "@type": "Quotation", "text": "I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.", "spokenByCharacter": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Fernando Pessoa" } } ] } { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://quotesby.net/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Authors", "item": "https://quotesby.net/authors/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "F", "item": "https://quotesby.net/authors/f/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 4, "name": "Fernando Pessoa", "item": "https://quotesby.net/Fernando-Pessoa" } ] } ```