Best Pessoa Quotes & Sayings

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want. — Fernando Pessoa

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars. — Fernando Pessoa

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa

We never love anyone. We love only our idea of what someone is like. We love an idea of our own; in short, it is ourselves that we love. — Fernando Pessoa

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses. — Fernando Pessoa

Thought can be lofty without being elegant, but to the extent it lacks elegance it will have less effect on others. Force without finesse is mere mass. — Fernando Pessoa

For me life is an inn where I must stay until the carriage from the abyss calls to collect me [ ... ] I could consider this inn to be a prison, since I'm compelled to stay here; I could consider it a kind of club, because I meet other people here. However, unlike others, I am neither impatient nor sociable. I leave those who chatter in the living room, from where the cosy sound of music and voices reaches me. I sit at the door and fill my eyes and ears with the colours and sounds of the landscape and slowly, just for myself, I sing vague songs that I compose while I wait.
Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too. — Fernando Pessoa

I have cultivated several personalities within myself. I constantly cultivate personalities. Each of my dreams, immediately after I dream it, is incarnated into another person, who then goes on to dream it, and I stop.
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. — Fernando Pessoa

Pg.9 In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation. — Fernando Pessoa

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void. — Fernando Pessoa

Let's absurdify life, from east to west.
Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living. — Fernando Pessoa

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. — Fernando Pessoa

If only, I feel now, if only I could be someone able to see all this as if he had no other relation with it than that of seeing it, someone able to observe everything as if he were an adult traveler newly arrived today on the surface of life! If only one had not learned, from birth onwards, to give certain accepted meanings to everything, but instead was able to see the meaning inherent in each thing rather than that imposed on it from without. If only one could know the human reality of the woman selling fish and go beyond just labeling her a fishwife and the known fact that she exists and sells fish. If only one could see the policeman as God sees him. If only one could notice everything for the first time, not apocalyptically, as if they were revelations of the Mystery, but directly as the flowerings of Reality. — Fernando Pessoa

My curiosity sister of larks. — Fernando Pessoa

If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls. — Fernando Pessoa

The nocturnal glory of being great without being
anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one
knows ... And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling
of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat,
acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and
in the caves of withdrawal from the world. — Fernando Pessoa

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living. — Fernando Pessoa

The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [ ... ] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things. — Fernando Pessoa

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 — Fernando Pessoa

Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret. — Fernando Pessoa

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue. — Fernando Pessoa

I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. — Fernando Pessoa

These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is. — Pessoa, Fernando

I've always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted - like all orphans - to be the object of someone's affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.
Whatever be the case, life pains me. — Fernando Pessoa

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. — Fernando Pessoa

Nom de Plume uses the device of the pseudonym to unite the likes of Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Fernando Pessoa, and Patricia Highsmith into a cohesive yet highly idiosyncratic literary history. Each page affords sparkling facts and valuable insights onto the manufacturing of books and reputations, the keeping and revealing of secrets, the vagaries of private life and public opinion, and the eternally mysterious, often tormented interface between life and literature. — Elif Batuman

I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots. — Fernando Pessoa

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable. — Fernando Pessoa

Does a flower really have beauty?
Does a fruit really have beauty?
No: they have only color and form
And existence.
Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist
But that I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they
give me.
It means nothing.
So why do I say about things: they're beautiful? — Fernando Pessoa

FIRST WATCHER Why do people die?
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough ... — Fernando Pessoa

The universe isn't mine: it's me. 139 — Fernando Pessoa

To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method - that's the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life's will. — Fernando Pessoa

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart. — Fernando Pessoa

Independently of me the grass grows, the rain falls on the grass that grows, and the sun shines on the patch of grass that grew or will grow; the hills have been there for ages, and the wind blows in the same way as when Homer heard it, even if he didn't exist. — Fernando Pessoa