14 Fernando Pessoa Quotes on Philosophy

Fernando Pessoa quotes on philosophy

2. Myth is the nothing that is all.

3. All beginnings are unvoluntary.

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

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.

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.

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.

96. Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

97. Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

100. The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

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

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.

126. The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

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.

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