Pessoa Disquiet Quotes & Sayings

Our rogue President, after selling face time ... — William Safire

Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. — Fernando Pessoa

Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we've felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we've based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn't nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears. — 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

Its, the gum tree, main appeal to me has been its combination of mightiness and delicacy - mighty in its strength of limb and delicate in the colouring of its covering. Then it has distinctive qualities; in fact I know of no other tree which is more decorative, both as regards the flow of its limbs and the patterns the bark makes on its main trunk. In all its stages the gum tree is extremely beautiful. — Hans Heysen

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul. — Fernando Pessoa

In one of these tales, 'The Ascetic', the title character tells his interlocutor that paradises and nirvanas are 'illusions inside other illusions. If you dream you're dreaming, is the dream you dream less real than the dream you dream you're dreaming?' This sort of musing is vaguely reminiscent of Disquiet in its formative phase, which may be why Pessoa decided to entrust it to Guedes, whose wide-ranging literary talents made him a potentially excellent author-administrator of such a capacious work. — Fernando Pessoa

No, we don't feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep. — Fernando Pessoa

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it. — Fernando Pessoa

No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES — Fernando Pessoa

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything. — Fernando Pessoa

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy. — Fernando Pessoa

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
From, The Book of Disquiet
— Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn't a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul. — Fernando Pessoa

I know my children will never have to say, 'Mom died of ovarian cancer.' — Angelina Jolie

The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes. — Peter De Vries

You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. — Barack Obama

I'd like to be known for stepping up, and encouraging others to do the same. — Leigh Anne Tuohy

Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! — Fernando Pessoa

Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely. — Anne Rice

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. — Fernando Pessoa

I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal, and is known as the harmonic series. — Leonard Bernstein

The gods do not fight against necessity. — Simonides Of Ceos

This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.] — Fernando Pessoa

Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. — Fernando Pessoa

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal. — Edward Abbey

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.
The book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa

My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning. — Fernando Pessoa

Art consists in making others feel what we feel. — Fernando Pessoa

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.] — Fernando Pessoa

You have to live each hour as if it's your last and each day as if you were immortal. - Kate Sheffield — Julia Quinn

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

Sin is rebellion against God. — Billy Graham

Everyone falls apart now and then," Casey assures me. "But something I've noticed, even in my profession, is that people are like puzzles. You may break apart, but there's always someone that can put you back together. — Micalea Smeltzer

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

Truly a good horse, good ground to gallop on, and sunshine, make up the sum of enjoyable travelling. — Isabella L. Bird