144 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, the enigmatic Portuguese poet and writer, was a literary chameleon whose works transcended conventional boundaries. Pessoa's most distinctive quality was his creation of heteronyms – fully realized alter egos, each with unique voices and perspectives. This literary approach not only showcased his astonishing creativity but also allowed him to explore a vast array of themes and styles. From the introspective melancholy of Álvaro de Campos to the sage musings of Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa's heteronyms delved into philosophical, existential, and emotional landscapes. His "Book of Disquiet," a fragmented, introspective work left unpublished during his lifetime, stands as a masterpiece of introspection and a meditation on the human condition. Pessoa's intricate interplay of identities and his profound grasp of the multiplicity of existence have cemented his reputation as one of the most innovative and complex literary figures of the 20th century.
Fernando Pessoa Quotes
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere. (Meaning)
To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. (Quote Meaning)
Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. (Meaning)
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! (Quote Meaning)
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd (Meaning)
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are. (Quote Meaning)
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. (Meaning)
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love. (Quote Meaning)
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
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.
Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. (Meaning)
I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. (Quote Meaning)
It's been a long time since I've been me.
I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me. (Meaning)
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 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.
Everything is worth it if the soul is not small. (Quote Meaning)
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
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves
We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect. (Meaning)
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. (Quote Meaning)
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.
To be great, be whole (Meaning)
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.
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.
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
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.
To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.
Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.
Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny, and this destiny is a web of stupidity and ignorance, of the indifference of everyone and each for all. (Quote Meaning)
I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.
Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.
In order to understand, I destroyed myself. (Meaning)
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.
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.
Strength without agility is a mere mass.
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.
Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
My past is everything I failed to be.
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.
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. (Quote Meaning)
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.
For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful
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.
I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?
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.
I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.
Literature exists because the world isn't enough.
I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
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'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.
There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. (Meaning)
Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal?
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, immediately at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.
I don't believe in the landscape.
And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.
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 pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.
The human soul is an abyss
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.
I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.
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.
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!
I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
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.
There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.
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.
To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.
I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.
Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.
The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
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.
The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.
I know nothing and my heart aches
Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
I never meant to be but a dreamer.
Life is good, but Wine is better.
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.
Could it think, the heart would stop beating. (Quote Meaning)
Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.
One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.
Art lies because it's social.
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
My joy is as painful as my pain.
Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.
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.
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Life is a thread that someone entangled.
Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. (Meaning)
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.
Everything is theater.
I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
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.
Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!
But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.
As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).
A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.
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.
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.
Contradiction is the essence of the universe.
To be understood is to prostitute oneself (Quote Meaning)
I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.
There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.
If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.
The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.
Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.
When I write, I solemnly visit myself.
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.
For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.
There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.
I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.
I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.
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.
― Fernando Pessoa Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
