Fernando Pessoa Quotes on Identity

22 quotes

  1. The sea is fulfilled, and the Empire undid itself. / Lord, Portugal remains to be accomplished!

  2. We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.

  3. I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.

  4. Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.

  5. It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.

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

  7. 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.

  8. I never meant to be but a dreamer.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

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

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

  13. I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.

  14. To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

  15. My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?

  16. My homeland is the portuguese language.

  17. 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.

  18. I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

  19. When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

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

  21. 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.

  22. 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.

All Fernando Pessoa quotes