Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.”

— Fernando Pessoa

152. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

155. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

157. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

159. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

166. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.”

— Fernando Pessoa

174. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

192. “Yes, tedium is boredom with the world, the malaise of living, the weariness of having lived; in truth, tedium is the feeling in one’s flesh of the endless emptiness of things.”

— Fernando Pessoa

193. “I asked for so little from life and life denied me even that.”

— Fernando Pessoa

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “All I ever asked of life was that it should pass me by without my even noticing it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

198. “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

199. “There’s a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness.”

— Fernando Pessoa

200. “At first I felt dizzy – not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that’s like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.”

— Fernando Pessoa