Pessoa, Fernando Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 20 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Pessoa, Fernando.
Famous Quotes By Pessoa, Fernando
Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being. — Pessoa, Fernando
The gods grant nothing more than life,
So let us reject whatever lifts us
To unbreathable heights,
Eternal but flowerless. — Pessoa, Fernando
In sexual love we seek our own pleasure through the intermediary of another's body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure through the intermediary of an idea we have. The onanist may be an abject creature but in truth he is the logical expression of the lover. He is the only one who neither diguises nor deludes himself. — Pessoa, Fernando
Let's not even touch life with the tips of our fingers.
Let's not even know the love in our minds.
May we never know the feel of a women's kiss, not even in our dreams. — Pessoa, Fernando
If a man of real sensitivity and correct reasoning feels concerned about the evil and injustice of the world, he naturally seeks to correct it first where it manifests itself closest to home and that, he will find, is in his own being. This task will take him his whole lifetime. — Pessoa, Fernando
He must be a grown man, stolid, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone's breadwinner - in other words, one of the living dead. — Pessoa, Fernando
How can I possess with my body, when I don't even possess my body? How can I possess with my soul, when I don't possess my soul? How can I understand with my mind, when I don't understand my mind? There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies, shadows of illusions, and our life is hollow on both the outside and the inside. — Pessoa, Fernando
These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is. — Pessoa, Fernando
Happy the man who demands no more from life than what life spontaneously gives him and who guides himself with the instinct of cats who seek the sun when there is sun and, when there is no sun, find what warmth they can. — Pessoa, Fernando
Living is in itself dying because every new day we enjoy is another day of our lives lost. — Pessoa, Fernando
Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.
Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself. — Pessoa, Fernando
For any spirit of scientific bent, seeing more in something that is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit. — Pessoa, Fernando
A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...I want no more from life than my dreams and this...It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is little and what is a lot? — Pessoa, Fernando
My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life's surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction. — Pessoa, Fernando
Peace at least. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I'm alone and calm. It's like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I'm no longer attracted to anything down here, I'm also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact. — Pessoa, Fernando
Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else in some other way, in some other world; weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self. — Pessoa, Fernando
To belong to something - that's banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles. — Pessoa, Fernando
They say tedium is a sickness that afflicts the inert, or only attacks those who have nothing to do. However, this affliction of the soul is subtles than that: it attacks those with a predisposition towards it and is less lenient on those who work or pretend to work (which comes to the same thing anyway) than on the truely inert. — Pessoa, Fernando
Everyone and everything oppresses me, chokes and maddens me; I am troubled by a crushing physical sense of other people's lack of comprehension. — Pessoa, Fernando