Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Literature exists because the world isn’t enough.”

— Fernando Pessoa

2. “I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I couldn’t want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

3. “I always live in the present. The future I can’t know. The past I no longer have.”

— Fernando Pessoa

4. “Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I’ll build a castle.”

— Fernando Pessoa

5. “In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

6. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

7. “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

8. “Life is good, but Wine is better.”

— Fernando Pessoa

9. “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

10. “To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.”

— Fernando Pessoa

11. “If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.”

— Fernando Pessoa

12. “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

13. “I know not what tomorrow will bring.”

— Fernando Pessoa

14. “Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.”

— Fernando Pessoa

15. “I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”

— Fernando Pessoa

16. “I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

17. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.”

— Fernando Pessoa

18. “Strength without agility is a mere mass.”

— Fernando Pessoa

19. “I look at myself but I’m missing. I know myself: it’s not me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

20. “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

21. “I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”

— Fernando Pessoa

22. “Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.”

— Fernando Pessoa

23. “And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.”

— Fernando Pessoa

24. “To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that’s really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.”

— Fernando Pessoa

25. “The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.”

— Fernando Pessoa

26. “There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.”

— Fernando Pessoa

27. “I’m sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”

— Fernando Pessoa

28. “My homeland is the portuguese language.”

— Fernando Pessoa

29. “Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want.”

— Fernando Pessoa

30. “God wills, man dreams, the work is born.”

— Fernando Pessoa

31. “Pedras no caminho? Eu guardo todas. Um dia vou construir um castelo.”

— Fernando Pessoa

32. “My past is everything I failed to be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

33. “Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

34. “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

35. “To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.”

— Fernando Pessoa

36. “My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

37. “I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.”

— Fernando Pessoa

38. “Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.”

— Fernando Pessoa

39. “We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.”

— Fernando Pessoa

40. “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

41. “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

42. “I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.”

— Fernando Pessoa

43. “We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”

— Fernando Pessoa

44. “Multipliquei-me para me sentir.”

— Fernando Pessoa

45. “The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”

— Fernando Pessoa

46. “God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.”

— Fernando Pessoa

47. “Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all ends and purposes and intentions.”

— Fernando Pessoa

48. “Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.”

— Fernando Pessoa

49. “Deus quer, o homem sonha, a obra nasce.”

— Fernando Pessoa

50. “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