Fernando Pessoa Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Fernando Pessoa quote about:
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“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“It's been a long time since I've been me.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.”
-- 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 -
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own”
-- Fernando Pessoa -
“After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
