Alberto Caeiro Quotes & Sayings

But if God is the flowers and the trees
And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,
Then I believe in him,
Then I believe in him all the time,
And my whole life is an oration and a mass,
And a communion with my eyes and through my ears. — Alberto Caeiro

I am a keeper of flocks.
The flocks are my thoughts
and all my thoughts are sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears,
with my hands and with my feet
and with my nose and my mouth.
For to consider a flower is to both see it and smell it
and to eat of fruit is to understand its meaning.

So when the sun is at its brightest
and I feel guilty for embracing it,
I stretch out, supine, on the grassy earth,
and close my sun drenched eyes.
I view my entire body lying firmly on reality,
I know the truth, and am content. — Alberto Caeiro

Let's only care about the place where we are.
There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.
If there's someone beyond the curve in the road,
Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road,
That's what the road is to them. — Alberto Caeiro

To love is to think.
And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.
I don't know what I want at all, even from her, and I don't think about anything but her.
I have a great animated distraction.
When I want to meet her,
I almost feel like not meeting her,
So I don't have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because it's like I'm afraid of her.
I don't know what I want at all, and I don't want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.
I'm asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think. — Alberto Caeiro

Water's water and that's why it's beautiful. — Alberto Caeiro

If I could take a bite of the whole world
And feel it on my palate
I'd be more happy for a minute or so...
But I don't always want to be happy.
Sometimes you have to be
Unhappy to be natural...

Not every day is sunny.
When there's been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come.
So I take unhappiness with happiness
Naturally, like someone who doesn't find it strange
That there are mountains and plains
And that there are cliffs and grass...

What you need is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel like someone seeing,
To think like someone walking,
And when it's time to die, remember the day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful...
That's how it is and that's how it should be... — Alberto Caeiro

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting -
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural. — Alberto Caeiro

A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales
Acts like a sick god, but like a god.
Because even though he affirms that what doesn't exist exists,
He knows things exist, that he exists,
He knows existing exists and doesn't explain itself,
And he knows there's no reason at all for anything to exist.
He knows being is the point.
All he doesn't know is that thought isn't the point.

(10/1/1917) — Alberto Caeiro

Yes: I exist inside my body.
I'm not carrying the sun and the moon in my pocket.
I don't want to conquer worlds because I slept badly,
And I don't want to eat the world for breakfast because I have a stomach.
Indifferent?
No: a son of the earth, who, if he jumps, it's wrong,
A moment in the air that's not for us,
And only happy when his feet hit the ground again,
Pow! In reality where nothing's missing!

(6/20/1919) — Alberto Caeiro

Praise be to God I'm not good,
And have the natural egotism of flowers
And rivers following their bed
Preoccupied without knowing it
Only with blooming and flowing.
This is the only mission in the World,
This - to exist clearly,
And to know how to do it without thinking about it.) — Alberto Caeiro

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,
And his sheep are straying on the hillside,
And he didn't even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.
No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.
Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.
No one had loved him, in the end.

When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:
The great valleys full of the same green as always,
The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,
All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.
(And once again the air, that he'd missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)
And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.

(7/10/1930) — Alberto Caeiro

The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset? — Alberto Caeiro

All beings exist and nothing else
And that's why they're called beings — Alberto Caeiro

He's taught me everything.
He taught me how to look at things.
He shows me everything there is in flowers.
He shows me how stones are pleasing
When you hold them in your hand
And look at them for a while. — Alberto Caeiro

Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,
Even when there's not a breeze at all, it seems
Like there's a light breeze blowing for a minute
But the trees are unmoving
In every leaf of their leaves
And our feelings have had an illusion,
An illusion of what would please them... — Alberto Caeiro

Something changed in part of reality - my knees and my hands.
What science has knowledge for this?
The blind man goes on his way and I don't make any more gestures.
It's already not the same time, or the same people, or anything the same.
This is being real. — Alberto Caeiro

the world wasn't made for us to think about it
(to think is to have eyes that aren't well)
but to look at it and be in agreement. — Alberto Caeiro

My look blue as the sky
Is as calm as water in the sun.
It's that way, blue and calm,
Because it doesn't question and it doesn't get surprised...

If I did question or got surprised
New flowers wouldn't bloom in the meadows
And nothing would change in the sun in a way to make it more beautiful...

(Even if new flowers bloomed in the meadows
And the sun turned more beautiful,
I would sense fewer flowers in the meadow
And would find the sun more ugly...
Because everything's like it is and so it's what it is,
And I accept, and I'm not even thankful,
So I don't seem to be thinking about it...) — Alberto Caeiro

Everything's different from us. That's why everything exists. — Alberto Caeiro

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.
But what is it, a row of trees? It's just trees.
Row and the plural trees aren't things, they're names. — Alberto Caeiro

Also at times, on the surface of streams,
Water?bubbles form
And grow and burst
And have no meaning at all
Except that they're water?bubbles
Growing and bursting. — Alberto Caeiro

I'm a keeper of flocks.
The flock is my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and with my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling it
And eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.

That's why when on a hot day
I feel sad from liking it so much,
And I throw myself lengthwise on the grass
And shut my hot eyes,
And feeling my whole body lying on reality,
I know the truth and I'm happy. — Alberto Caeiro

From my village I see as much in the Universe as you can see from earth.
So my village is as big as any other land
Because I'm the size of what I see,
Not the size of my height. — Alberto Caeiro

Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things. — Alberto Caeiro

Nature never remembers, that's why she's beautiful. — Alberto Caeiro

I love flowers for being flowers, directly.
And I love trees for being trees without my thought. — Alberto Caeiro

If I talk about her like she's a being
It's because talking about her I need to use the language of men
Which gives personality to things,
And imposes a name on things. — Alberto Caeiro

A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;
And the road didn't become more beautiful or even more ugly.
That's human action on the outside world.
We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;
And the sun is always punctual every day.

(5/7/14) — Alberto Caeiro

One day when God fell asleep
And the Holy Ghost went off flying,
He got into a box of miracles and stole three.
With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run away.
With the second he made himself a human boy forever.
With the third he created a Christ eternally crucified
And left him nailed to the cross that there is in Heaven
Where he's used as a model for other crosses.
Then he ran away to the sun
And came down on the first ray he caught. — Alberto Caeiro

And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,
And commerce, and the ships leaving
Their smoke on the high seas.
Because he knows all of this lacks the truth
A flower has in its blooming
And which moves with the sunlight
Changing the hills and valleys — Alberto Caeiro

Let's be simple and calm,
Like brooks and trees,
And God will love us by making
Beautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,
And give us greenness in his spring,
And a river for us to go to when we end... — Alberto Caeiro

I pass and I stay, like the Universe. — Alberto Caeiro

It's an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it's the soul
But it's not the soul: it's the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing. — Alberto Caeiro

I'm glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I've read. — Alberto Caeiro

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!
He's stupid if he doesn't know other people's unhappiness is theirs,
And isn't cured from the outside,
Because suffering isn't like running out of ink,
Or a trunk not having iron bands!

There being injustice is like there being death. — Alberto Caeiro

It's stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand. — Alberto Caeiro

I don't bother with rhyme. Rarely
Are two trees the same, one beside the other.
I think and write like flowers have color
But with less perfection in my way of expressing myself
Because I lack the divine simplicity
Of wholly being only my exterior.

I see and I'm moved,
Moved the way water runs when the ground is sloping
And what I write is as natural as the rising wind... — Alberto Caeiro

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.
To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy. — Alberto Caeiro

I'm one of my sensations. — Alberto Caeiro

But if God is the trees and the flowers
And the hills and the moonlight and the sun,
Why should I call him God?
I call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moonlight;
Because if he made himself for me to see
As the sun and moonlight and flowers and trees and hills,
If he appears to me as trees and hills
And moonlight and sun and flowers,
It's because he wants me to know him
As trees and hills and flowers and moonlight and sun.

And that's why I obey him,
(What more do I know about God than God knows about himself?),
I obey him by living, spontaneously,
Like someone opening his eyes and seeing,
And I call him moonlight and sun and flowers and trees and hills,
And I love him without thinking about him,
And I think him by seeing and hearing,
And I walk with him all the time. — Alberto Caeiro

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I've got it.
I'm a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn't think. — Alberto Caeiro

It's not enough to open the window
To see the fields and the river.
It's also not enough to not be blind
To see the trees and the flowers.
It's also necessary to not have any philosophy at all.
With philosophy there are no trees, there are only ideas.
There's only each of us, like a wine-cellar.
There's only a shut window and the world outside it;
And a dream of what you could see if you opened the window,
Which is never what you see when you open the window. — Alberto Caeiro

I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside.
I don't believe I exist behind myself. — Alberto Caeiro

The main thing is knowing how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when you see,
And not think when you see
Or see when you think. — Alberto Caeiro

If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I'm lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don't need reason - I have shoulderblades. — Alberto Caeiro

I don't always feel what I know I should feel.
My thought crosses the river I swim very slowly
Because the suit men made it wear weighs it down. — Alberto Caeiro

What comes, when it comes, will be what it is. — Alberto Caeiro

I was never a keeper of sheep — Alberto Caeiro

The river of my village doesn't make you think about anything.
When you're at its bank you're only at its bank. — Alberto Caeiro

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
And Spring came the day after tomorrow,
I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow.
If that's its time, when else should it come?
I like it that everything is real and everything is right;
And I like that it would be like this even if I didn't like it.
And so, if I die now, I die peacefully
Because everything is real and everything is right. — Alberto Caeiro

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.
Each thing only reminds us of what it is
And it's only what nothing else is.
The fact that it's it separates it from every other thing.
(Everything's nothing without another thing that's not it). — Alberto Caeiro

And sometimes if I want
To imagine I'm a lamb
(Or a whole flock
Spreading out all over the hillside
So I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),
It's only because I feel what I write at sunset,
Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light
And silence runs over the grass outside.
When I sit and write poems
Or, walking along the roads or pathways,
I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,
I feel a staff in my hand
And see my silhouette
On top of a knoll,
Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,
With a silly smile like someone who doesn't understand what somebody's saying
But tries to pretend they do. — Alberto Caeiro

There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?
But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.
No wind whatsoever brought you now.
Now you're here.
What you were isn't you, or else the whole rose would be here. — Alberto Caeiro

I was born subject like others to errors and defects,
But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,
Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..
Never to the defect of demanding of the World
That it be anything that's not the World. — Alberto Caeiro

I don't regret anything I was before because I still am.
I only regret not having loved you.
Put your hands in mine
And let's be quiet, surrounded by life. — Alberto Caeiro

Those soapbubbles that kid
Amuses himself with by blowing them from a straw
Are transparently a whole philosophy.

Clear, useless and fleeting like Nature,
Friends to the eyes like things,
They are what they are
With a little round airy precision,
And nobody, not even the kid who's making them,
Pretends they're more than they appear to be.

Some are hard to see in the clear air.
They're like a breeze that blows and barely touches the flowers
And we only know it's blowing
Because something lightens in us
And accepts everything more clearly. — Alberto Caeiro

Accept the universe
As the gods gave it to you.
If the gods wanted to give you something else
They'd have done it.

If there are other matters and other worlds
There are. — Alberto Caeiro

Night doesn't fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight. — Alberto Caeiro

She's a manner of speaking.
Even the flowers don't come back, or the green leaves.
There are new flowers, new green leaves.
There are other beautiful days.
Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real. — Alberto Caeiro

That lady has a piano.
It's nice, but it's not the running of rivers
Or the murmuring trees make ..

Who needs a piano?
It's better to have ears
And love Nature. — Alberto Caeiro

Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
A wind passes very lightly
And goes away, always very lightly.
And I don't know what I think
And I don't want to know. — Alberto Caeiro

She goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before,
I go on like before, alone in the field.
It's like my head had been lowered,
And if I think this, and raise my head
And the golden sun dries the need to cry I can't stop having.
How vast the field and interior love... !
I look, and I forget, like dryness where there was water and trees losing their leaves. — Alberto Caeiro

I don't have a philosophy: I have senses...
If I talk about Nature, it's not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking. — Alberto Caeiro

Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
There passes for a moment the figure of a man.
His steps go with "him" in the same reality,
But I look at him and them, and they're two things:
The "man" goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,
And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.
I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.
How perfect that he is in him what he is - his body,
His true reality which doesn't have desires or hopes,
But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them. — Alberto Caeiro

What does this think about that?
Nothing thinks about anything.
Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants?
If it did, it would be people. . .
Why am I worrying about this?
If I think about these things,
I'll stop seeing trees and plants
And stop seeing the Earth
For only seeing my thoughts...
I'll get unhappy and stay in the dark.
And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky. — Alberto Caeiro

The Tejo runs down from Spain
And the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.
Everybody knows that.
But not many people know the river of my village
And where it comes from
And where it's going.
And so, because it belongs to less people,
The river of my village is freer and greater. — Alberto Caeiro

I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys, plains,
That there are trees, flowers, weeds,
That there are rivers and stones,
But there is not a whole these belong to,
That a real and true wholeness
Is a sickness of our ideas. — Alberto Caeiro

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.
I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.
They're things known from the outside.
But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head. — Alberto Caeiro

I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing,
And I look at flowers and I smile...
I don't know if they understand me
Or if I understand them,
But I know the truth is in them and in me
And in our common divinity
Of letting ourselves go and live on the Earth
And carrying us in our arms through the contented Seasons
And letting the wind sing us to sleep
And not have dreams in our sleep. — Alberto Caeiro

And since today's all there is for now, that's everything.
Who knows if I'll be dead the day after tomorrow?
If I'm dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow
Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn't died.
Of course I know thunderstorms don't fall because I see them,
But if I weren't in the world,
The world would be different -
There would be me the less -
And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.
No matter what happens, what's falling is what'll be falling when it falls.

(7/10/1930) — Alberto Caeiro

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don't want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It's something relative to the past and the future.
It's a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don't want to include time in my scheme.
I don't want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don't want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn't even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can't think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn't a science. — Alberto Caeiro

Even so, I'm somebody.
I'm the Discoverer of Nature.
I'm the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring a new Universe to the Universe
Because I bring the Universe to itself. — Alberto Caeiro

That thing over there was more there than it's there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn't look very much, — Alberto Caeiro

If I die very young, hear this:
I was never anything but a kid playing.
I was a heathen like the sun and the water,
I had the universal religion only people don't have.
I was happy because I didn't ask for anything at all,
Or tried to find anything,
And I didn't find any more explanation
Than the word explanation having no meaning at all. — Alberto Caeiro

I'm in no hurry. What for?
The sun and moon aren't in a hurry: they're right.
Hurrying is believing people can get past their legs,
Or that, jumping, they can land past their shadow.
No; I don't know how to hurry. — Alberto Caeiro

I don't know how to talk because I'm feeling.
I'm listening to my voice as if it were someone else's,
And my voice is speaking about her as if she were speaking.
She has hair as blond as yellow wheat in the sun,
And when she speaks her mouth says things that aren't words.
She laughs, and her teeth are as clean as stones in a river. — Alberto Caeiro

On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,
And I begin to meditate about problems I make up. — Alberto Caeiro