Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

155. “I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.”

— Fernando Pessoa

156. “Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I have been everything, nothing is worth anything.”

— Fernando Pessoa

157. “Art frees us, through illusion, from the squalor of being.”

— Fernando Pessoa

158. “The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.”

— Fernando Pessoa

159. “The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.”

— Fernando Pessoa

160. “My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?”

— Fernando Pessoa

161. “There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

162. “Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.”

— Fernando Pessoa

163. “In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.”

— Fernando Pessoa

164. “Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”

— Fernando Pessoa

165. “We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It’s the one that is divided In right or wrong.”

— Fernando Pessoa

166. “We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.”

— Fernando Pessoa

167. “I’ve reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.”

— Fernando Pessoa

168. “I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.”

— Fernando Pessoa

169. “I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.”

— Fernando Pessoa

170. “My life is so sad, and yet I do not even consider weeping over it; my hours are so false, and I do not even dream the gesture that might end them.”

— Fernando Pessoa

171. “Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.”

— Fernando Pessoa

172. “Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.”

— Fernando Pessoa

173. “Nature is the difference between the soul and God.”

— Fernando Pessoa

174. “Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there’s no palace till it’s built.”

— Fernando Pessoa

175. “When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.”

— Fernando Pessoa

176. “Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.”

— Fernando Pessoa

177. “It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.”

— Fernando Pessoa

178. “The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.”

— Fernando Pessoa

179. “Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.”

— Fernando Pessoa

180. “Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.”

— Fernando Pessoa

181. “And in the depths of my soul – the only reality of the moment – there is an intense, invisible pain, a sadness like the sound of someone weeping in a dark room.”

— Fernando Pessoa

182. “It’s in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.”

— Fernando Pessoa

183. “My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.”

— Fernando Pessoa

184. “I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul.”

— Fernando Pessoa

185. “I created myself, echo and abyss, by thinking. I multiplied myself by going deeply into myself...”

— Fernando Pessoa

186. “Everyone has his vanity, and each one’s vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.”

— Fernando Pessoa

187. “Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

188. “A physical nausea, prompted by all of life, was born in the moment I woke up. A horror at the prospect of having to live got up with me out of bed. Everything seemed hollow, and I had the chilling impression that there is no solution for whatever the problem may be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

189. “I’m always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice.”

— Fernando Pessoa

190. “We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.”

— Fernando Pessoa

191. “Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I do not seek to live, to act or to feel, it is – believe me – so as not to disturb the already laid-down lines of my false persona.”

— Fernando Pessoa

192. “Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.”

— Fernando Pessoa

193. “The entire life of the human soul is mere motions in the shadows. We live in a twilight of consciousness, never in accord with whom we are or think we are. Everyone harbours some kind of vanity, and there’s an error whose degree we can’t determine. We’re something that goes on during the show’s intermission; sometimes, through certain doors, we catch a glimpse of what may be no more than scenery. The world is one big confusion, like voices in the night.”

— Fernando Pessoa

194. “But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.”

— Fernando Pessoa

195. “I belong to a generation – or rather, to part of a generation – that lost all respect for the past and all belief or hope in the future. And so we live off the present with the hunger and eagerness of those who have no other home.”

— Fernando Pessoa

196. “Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.”

— Fernando Pessoa

197. “For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.”

— Fernando Pessoa

198. “The world belongs to who doesn’t feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.”

— Fernando Pessoa

199. “Life is a thread that someone entangled.”

— Fernando Pessoa

200. “And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa