Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

53. “Everything is theater.”

— Fernando Pessoa

54. “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

55. “I am the escaped one, After I was born They locked me up inside me But I left. My soul seeks me, Through hills and valley, I hope my soul Never finds me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

56. “In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.”

— Fernando Pessoa

57. “You breathe better when you’re rich.”

— Fernando Pessoa

58. “To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand.”

— Fernando Pessoa

59. “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”

— Fernando Pessoa

60. “Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.”

— Fernando Pessoa

61. “I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

62. “Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.”

— Fernando Pessoa

63. “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

64. “Primeiro estranha-se. Depois entranha-se”.”

— Fernando Pessoa

65. “I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”

— Fernando Pessoa

66. “Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn’t. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.”

— Fernando Pessoa

67. “By day I am nothing, by night I am I.”

— Fernando Pessoa

68. “To think is to destroy.”

— Fernando Pessoa

69. “Everything belongs to someone else, except the pain of not having it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

70. “I exist unconsciously and I’ll die unwillingly. I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway-house between things, like myself, that are nothing. How disquieting it is to feel, how troubling it is to think, how vain to want!”

— Fernando Pessoa

71. “But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

72. “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

73. “Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.”

— Fernando Pessoa

74. “Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

75. “There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.”

— Fernando Pessoa

76. “Contradiction is the essence of the universe.”

— Fernando Pessoa

77. “As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.”

— Fernando Pessoa

78. “Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I’m like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn’t know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.”

— Fernando Pessoa

79. “The right way to live is something we can only teach the dead.”

— Fernando Pessoa

80. “Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.”

— Fernando Pessoa

81. “Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal?”

— Fernando Pessoa

82. “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

83. “Sit under the sun abdicate and be your own king.”

— Fernando Pessoa

84. “I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

85. “I know nothing and my heart aches.”

— Fernando Pessoa

86. “There’s no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.”

— Fernando Pessoa

87. “The human soul is an abyss.”

— Fernando Pessoa

88. “To narrate is to create, whilst to live is merely to be lived.”

— Fernando Pessoa

89. “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

90. “And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

91. “The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own.”

— Fernando Pessoa

92. “Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”

— Fernando Pessoa

93. “Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.”

— Fernando Pessoa

94. “Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature.”

— Fernando Pessoa

95. “My soul’s the present shadow of a presence gone.”

— Fernando Pessoa

96. “Let’s absurdify life, from east to west. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.”

— Fernando Pessoa

97. “If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.”

— Fernando Pessoa

98. “What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

99. “Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

100. “I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up.”

— Fernando Pessoa