Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Fernando Pessoa

202. “Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”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

203. “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

204. “We live by action – by acting on desire. Those of us who don’t know how to want – whether geniuses or beggars – are related by impotence.”

— Fernando Pessoa

205. “Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.”

— Fernando Pessoa

206. “Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”

— Fernando Pessoa

207. “I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping. For me there’s no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.”

— Fernando Pessoa

208. “The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

209. “Let’s buy books so as not to read them; let’s go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who’s there; let’s take long walks because we’re sick of walking; and let’s spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.”

— Fernando Pessoa

210. “In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.”

— Fernando Pessoa

211. “I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.”

— Fernando Pessoa

212. “Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.”

— Fernando Pessoa

213. “Art consists in making others feel what we feel.”

— Fernando Pessoa

214. “I’d like to be in the country so that I’d could like being in the city.”

— Fernando Pessoa

215. “All our abstract intelligence is good for is constructing systems, or semi-systematic ideas, which for animals is a simple matter of lying in the sun.”

— Fernando Pessoa

216. “But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul’s body. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?”

— Fernando Pessoa

217. “Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.”

— Fernando Pessoa

218. “A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

219. “I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don’t know where it will take me, for I know nothing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

220. “We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known.”

— Fernando Pessoa

221. “These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.”

— Fernando Pessoa

222. “Better to dream than to be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

223. “And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.”

— Fernando Pessoa

224. “There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.”

— Fernando Pessoa

225. “I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.”

— Fernando Pessoa

226. “After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth – clear skies; moist brilliant earth – greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.”

— Fernando Pessoa

227. “I have never been anything more than a mere vestige, a simulacrum of myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

228. “Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.”

— Fernando Pessoa

229. “All effort is pointless, but it passes the time. Reasoning is sterile, but amusing. Loving is tedious, but possibly preferable to not loving.”

— Fernando Pessoa

230. “Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.”

— Fernando Pessoa

231. “I live always in the present. I know nothing of the future and no longer have a past. The former weighs me down with a thousand possibilities, the latter with the reality of nothingness.”

— Fernando Pessoa

232. “I never meant to be but a dreamer.”

— Fernando Pessoa

233. “We’re convalescents. Most of us are people who never learned an art or a trade, not even the art of enjoying life. Since we’re basically averse to prolonged social contact, even the greatest of friends tend to bore us after half an hour; we only long to see them when we think about seeing them, and the best moments we spend with them occur in our dreams.”

— Fernando Pessoa

234. “Faithful to the word given and the idea had.”

— Fernando Pessoa

235. “I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.”

— Fernando Pessoa

236. “How wearisome to let one’s existence become something absolutely dependent on someone else’s feelings; to have no option but to feel, to love a little too, whether or not it is reciprocated.”

— Fernando Pessoa

237. “Fraternity has subtleties.”

— Fernando Pessoa

238. “The divine fact of existing shouldn’t be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.”

— Fernando Pessoa

239. “I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.”

— Fernando Pessoa

240. “Property isn’t theft: it’s nothing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

241. “Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

242. “Money can’t buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things.”

— Fernando Pessoa

243. “I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others.”

— Fernando Pessoa

244. “I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky – Seen, nothing in it to see.”

— Fernando Pessoa

245. “In everything I am an intense, rather coarse dilettante.”

— Fernando Pessoa

246. “I search and can’t find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

247. “If the heart could think it would stop beating.”

— Fernando Pessoa

248. “Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.”

— Fernando Pessoa

249. “Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?”

— Fernando Pessoa

250. “I should explain that I really did travel, but everything smacks to me of merely telling myself that I travelled, although I didn’t. I carried back and forth, from north to south and east to west, the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living a present, and the tedium of having to have a future. And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future.”

— Fernando Pessoa