Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It’s faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.”

— Fernando Pessoa

252. “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

253. “Life is the hesitation between an exclamation mark and a question mark. After doubt there is a full stop.”

— Fernando Pessoa

254. “But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is – is that living?”

— Fernando Pessoa

255. “We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.”

— Fernando Pessoa

256. “Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.”

— Fernando Pessoa

257. “All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.”

— Fernando Pessoa

258. “Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

259. “To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

260. “I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

262. “To consider our greatest anguish an incident of no importance, not just in terms of the life of the universe, but in terms of our own souls, is the beginning of knowledge.”

— Fernando Pessoa

263. “There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.”

— Fernando Pessoa

264. “I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

265. “So great is my tedium, so overwhelming the horror of being alive, that I cannot imagine what could possibly serve as a palliative, an antidote, a balm, a source of oblivion.”

— Fernando Pessoa

266. “To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.”

— Fernando Pessoa

267. “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

268. “I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.”

— Fernando Pessoa

269. “Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. 122.”

— Fernando Pessoa

270. “Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.”

— Fernando Pessoa

271. “Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I’m nobody, absolutely nobody.”

— Fernando Pessoa

272. “We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

273. “Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.”

— Fernando Pessoa

274. “We don’t even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars.”

— Fernando Pessoa

275. “At the end of this day there remains what was left behind of yesterday and what will be left behind of tomorrow: the insatiable, innumerable longing to be always the same and always other.”

— Fernando Pessoa

276. “Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me?”

— Fernando Pessoa

277. “De tanto lidar com sombras, eu mesmo me converti numa sombra – no que penso, no que sinto, no que sou.”

— Fernando Pessoa

278. “Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.”

— Fernando Pessoa

279. “I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.”

— Fernando Pessoa

280. “Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.”

— Fernando Pessoa

281. “On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable.”

— Fernando Pessoa

282. “Peki, kim kurtaracak beni var olmaktan?”

— Fernando Pessoa

283. “Isn’t joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice.”

— Fernando Pessoa

284. “To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person’s God-given ability to make mistakes.”

— Fernando Pessoa

285. “I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.”

— Fernando Pessoa

286. “I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

287. “The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.”

— Fernando Pessoa

288. “Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.”

— Fernando Pessoa

289. “His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it’s perfectly useless to hope.”

— Fernando Pessoa

290. “I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I’m proud of myself for dissenting from life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

291. “My joy is as painful as my pain.”

— Fernando Pessoa

292. “I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”

— Fernando Pessoa

293. “Let us not be deceived by hope, because it betrays, or by love, because it grows weary, or by life, because it satiates but does not sate, or even by death, because it brings more than you want and less than you expect.”

— Fernando Pessoa

294. “The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.”

— Fernando Pessoa

295. “Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude being built on the stoicism of the weak.”

— Fernando Pessoa

296. “I don’t write in Portuguese. I write myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

297. “We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.”

— Fernando Pessoa

298. “How confidently we believe in our interpretation of other people’s words.”

— Fernando Pessoa

299. “I have all the conditions for happiness, save happiness. The conditions are detached from one another.”

— Fernando Pessoa

300. “Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn’t eternally have been just a retired major.”

— Fernando Pessoa