Fernando Quotes & Sayings

I don't know what to say about myself. I don't know myself (laughs). People say my humility but I believe we're all humble in our own way. I try to stay close to my family and friends. — Fernando Torres

In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers. — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Torres needs to be loved on a regular basis — Mark Lawrenson

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

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle. — Fernando Pessoa

."I'm so in love with you, Summer. I don't think that will ever change," he says into my hair.
My eyes close as I fall into deep sleep. — Chantal Fernando

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

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [ ... ] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties. — Fernando J. Corbato

Life is a continuous feeling wherein something you work for it to be happy in terms of your soul. — Fernando Lachica

Purpose without virtue is vanity. — Fernando Torres

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. — Fernando Pessoa

Action disconcerts us, partly because of our physical incompetence, but mainly because it offends our moral sensibility. We consider it immoral to act. It seems to us that every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it. — 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

In the end, everything will be okay. If it's not okay, it's not yet the end. ~Fernando Sabino, translated from Portuguese — Fernando Sabino

I guess just personally I've become a bolder person in my day-to-day. I think a lot of it came from moving to Brooklyn. I just sort of became an adult and started speaking up for myself and not apologising for myself. — Fernando Torres

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

Like all who are impassioned, I take blissful delight in losing myself, in fully experiencing the thrill of surrender. And so I often write with no desire to think, in an externalized reverie, letting the words cuddle me like a baby in their arms. They form sentences with no meaning, flowing softly like water I can feel, a forgetful stream whose ripples mingle and undefine, becoming other, still other ripples, and still again other. Thus ideas and images, throbbing with expressiveness, pass through me in resounding processions of pale silks on which imagination shimmers like moonlight, dappled and indefinite. — Fernando Pessoa

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

This crisis is not just a crisis. Consumers are understanding for the first time that [their] degree of personal happiness doesn't rise past a certain earnings threshold. — Fernando Rodes Vila

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

The country morning exists; the city morning promises. The former makes one live; the latter makes one think. And I'm doomed always to feel, like the world's great damned men, that it's better to think than to live. 202 — Fernando Pessoa

God wills, man dreams, the work is born. — Fernando Pessoa

Immigration and travel certainly don't mean the same thing everywhere. Here in Cuba, the big wall isn't just the fact that it's an island, but the fact that we need an exit permit in order to leave, and the letters of invitation in order to visit another country. — Fernando Perez

The base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity. And that's what I try to do. — Fernando Perez

I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won't need a corridor
Of thought leading to words. — Fernando Pessoa

Battling through poverty was not my forte, and I didn't have the inkling of eluding them. — Fernando Lachica

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

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. — 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

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people. — Fernando Pessoa

In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought. — Fernando Pessoa

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living. — Fernando Pessoa

Life is a thread that someone entangled. — Fernando Pessoa

You've never heard the wind blow. The wind only speaks of the wind. What you heard was a lie, And the lie is in you. — Fernando Pessoa

It's often pointed out that in Cuban cinema there are too many comedies, but a sense of humor is so much part of the Cuban idiosyncrasy. Curiously, the films that have been censored the most have been humorous. — Fernando Perez

When I race in Australia or Korea or Japan I know it will be a big change for me because Ferrari fans are worldwide. — Fernando Alonso

I've never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn't mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. — Fernando Pessoa

Peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself. — Fernando Pessoa

Contradiction is the essence of the universe. — Fernando Pessoa

Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intellegence inherent in that stupidity. [ ... ] The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest accident becomes imbued with great significance. — Fernando Pessoa

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing. — Fernando Pessoa

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom. — Fernando Pessoa

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. — Fernando Pessoa

I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it's extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think nothing better than these long slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost o sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but still with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life. — Fernando Pessoa

Caesar gave the ultimate definition of ambition when he said: 'Better to be the chief of a village than a subaltern in Rome'. — Fernando Pessoa

The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified. — Fernando Pessoa

But every company of the future is going to be in the business of exquisite care - which means quick turnaround time and convenience. To deliver exquisite care, you need an organization that coordinates well and listens well. — Fernando Flores

We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong. — Fernando Pessoa

I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single blissful colour..
... On a clear bright day even the softness of the sounds is golden ... — Fernando Pessoa

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. — Fernando Pessoa

A feel-good style can be a symptom of unawareness or lack of caring. — Fernando Flores

I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life. — Fernando Pessoa

There's no sunset so lovely it couldn't be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep. — Fernando Pessoa

That most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. — Fernando Pessoa

The divine fact of existing shouldn't be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting. — Fernando Pessoa

I'm not like a voracious hoarder who has 50,000 albums of vinyl stacked in a storage space in the San Fernando Valley. But I do have albums from the last 40 years of my life. — Dave Grohl

"You will accomplish a lot more with movement than you will with motivation." So MOVE. Create action. Make plans and stick to them. But above all: Cut Out The Input, And Begin The Output ... — Fernando Cruz

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

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

We live in an extraordinary time — Fernando Flores

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

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation. — Fernando Botero

I live in a developing country. — Fernando Meirelles

Many people find that they frequently slip into negative, unproductive moods, and, once in these moods, it can be difficult to shift out of them. We suggest that this happens because most people have an interpretation of mood and emotion that limits their power to observe and change their moods. — Fernando Flores

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

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

Encino is a small community in the San Fernando Valley smashed up against and completely indistinguishable from all other Valley communities. You can drive from one to the other, passing the same dry cleaners, dubious sushi restaurants, and gas stations, without so much as a sign to mark your transition. It does, frankly, matter much where are you. If anything at all marks Encino from its clone neighbors, it's that it isn't aging quite as well. Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills have kept their figures and shown up on time for regular collagen injections while Encino is really starting to let itself go. — Ashley Ream

An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it. — Fernando Botero

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad. — Fernando Pessoa

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. — Fernando Pessoa

As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure Object of Desire in Seville and I suddenly found myself telling Fernando Rey, at the end of a scene, to pick up a big sack filled with tools lying on a bench, sling it over his shoulder, and walk away. The action was completely irrational, yet it seemed absolutely right to me. Still, I was worried about it, so I shot two versions of the scene: one with the sack, one without. But during the rushes the following day, the whole crew agreed that the scene was much better with the sack. Why? I can't explain it, and I don't enjoy rummaging around in the cliches of psychoanalysis. — Luis Bunuel

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.
For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought. — Fernando Pessoa

I've always been treated in a friendly manner, and even people I hardly know have rarely been rude or brusque or cold to me. In certain people that friendly manner, with my encouragement, might have been converted into love or affection, but I've never had the patience or mental concentration to even want to make the effort. — Fernando Pessoa

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary. — 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

I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it's time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it's not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I'm no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity. — Fernando Pessoa

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

That's why we're doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don't have anything against it (Halloween), but it's not our tradition. — Fernando Flores

Living in Brooklyn it's a very fend-for-yourself place. Maybe it's made me a little bit harsh but I don't consider that to be pejorative. — Fernando Torres

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

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

They explored me high enough as mountain climbers reached the mountain tops. — Fernando Lachica

My curiosity sister of larks. — Fernando Pessoa

She tries to turn too soon, and the ladder smacks into Fernando's shoulder.
"Oh! Sorry, Nando."
The jolt knocks his glasses askew. He smiles at Christina and takes the glasses off, shoving them into his pocket.
"Nando?" I say to him. "I thought the Erudite didn't like nicknames?"
"When a pretty girl calls you by a nickname," he says, "it is only logical to respond to it. — Veronica Roth

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

The writing is therapeutic for me, it's an introverted process, I'm really inside my head. It's a really obsessive process. The live show, though, is the opposite. It's an extroverted process. It pushes me to connect with people, and so it pulls me out of my head and just pulls me out of myself. — Fernando Torres

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