Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Liberty is the possibility of isolation.”

— Fernando Pessoa

102. “I’m upset by the happiness of all these men who don’t know they’re unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!”

— Fernando Pessoa

103. “Suddenly I’m all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I’m alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyze is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I’m so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I’m a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house.”

— Fernando Pessoa

104. “I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”

— Fernando Pessoa

105. “The universe isn’t mine: it’s me. 139.”

— Fernando Pessoa

106. “To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”

— Fernando Pessoa

107. “This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they’re right.”

— Fernando Pessoa

108. “I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.”

— Fernando Pessoa

109. “But if God is the flowers and trees And hills and sun and moon, Then why should I call him God? I’ll call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moon.”

— Fernando Pessoa

110. “My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.”

— Fernando Pessoa

111. “I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.”

— Fernando Pessoa

112. “The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine.”

— Fernando Pessoa

113. “To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.”

— Fernando Pessoa

114. “Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.”

— Fernando Pessoa

115. “Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.”

— Fernando Pessoa

116. “For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful.”

— Fernando Pessoa

117. “To be understood is to prostitute oneself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

118. “Every gesture is a revolutionary act.”

— Fernando Pessoa

119. “Humanitarianism is rude.”

— Fernando Pessoa

120. “The search for the truth – whether the subjective truth of one’s own convictions, the objective truth of reality or the social truth of money or power – always brings with it, if the searcher in question deserves the prize, the ultimate knowledge that the truth does not exist.”

— Fernando Pessoa

121. “Myth is the nothing that is all.”

— Fernando Pessoa

122. “Why try to be like others if you’re condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it’s of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don’t?”

— Fernando Pessoa

123. “I don’t believe in the landscape.”

— Fernando Pessoa

124. “Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.”

— Fernando Pessoa

125. “I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born.”

— Fernando Pessoa

126. “I find the present monotonous and absurd spectacle of the world outside me so completely lacking in value or nobility that I can scarcely conceive of it as being the world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

127. “When I write, I solemnly visit myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

128. “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

129. “Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he’s never out of sorts.”

— Fernando Pessoa

130. “The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.”

— Fernando Pessoa

131. “Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!”

— Fernando Pessoa

132. “Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.”

— Fernando Pessoa

133. “Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.”

— Fernando Pessoa

134. “Recognizing that reality is a kind of illusion, and that illusion is a kind of reality, is simultaneously necessary and pointless.”

— Fernando Pessoa

135. “Every gesture is a dead dream.”

— Fernando Pessoa

136. “What’s most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.”

— Fernando Pessoa

137. “Those who really suffer don’t form groups, don’t go around in a gang. Those who suffer suffer alone.”

— Fernando Pessoa

138. “Believe me, if there were no intelligent people pointing out all our various human ills, humanity would not even notice them. Sensitive people make others suffer out of sympathy.”

— Fernando Pessoa

139. “There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies. Shadows of illusions, our lives are hollow on both the outside and the inside.”

— Fernando Pessoa

140. “Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

141. “Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

142. “I’m a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.”

— Fernando Pessoa

143. “I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.”

— Fernando Pessoa

144. “There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they’re enthralled by their own impotence.”

— Fernando Pessoa

145. “It could have been any number of things: hardship, grief or simply the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having suffered too much.”

— Fernando Pessoa

146. “Before my unfeeling eyes, the repressed bitterness of my whole life peels off the suit of natural joy it wears in the prolonged randomness of every day. I realize that I’m always sad, however happy or content I may often feel. And the part of me that realizes this stands a little behind me...”

— Fernando Pessoa

147. “And leaning out the window, enjoying the day above the varying volume of the entire city, only one thought swells my soul – the intimate will to die, to finish, not to see more light over any city, not to think, not to feel, to leave behind like wrapping paper the course of the sun and the days, to rid myself, at the edge of the grand bed, as of a heavy suit, of the involuntary effort to be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

148. “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

149. “Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face. That’s what’s most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.”

— Fernando Pessoa

150. “Should you ask me if I’m happy, I’ll answer that I’m not.”

— Fernando Pessoa