Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “How confidently we believe in our interpretation of other people’s words.”

— Fernando Pessoa

302. “Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

303. “Futile and sensitive, I’m capable of violent and consuming impulses – both good and bad, noble and vile – but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

304. “I’m so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind.”

— Fernando Pessoa

305. “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

306. “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

307. “It’s like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness.”

— Fernando Pessoa

308. “Our Lady of the Hours that Pass, Madonna of stagnant waters and dead algae, Tutelary Goddess of vast deserts and dark landscapes of barren rocks, free me from my youth.”

— Fernando Pessoa

309. “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

310. “It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.”

— Fernando Pessoa

311. “Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.”

— Fernando Pessoa

312. “Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief.”

— Fernando Pessoa

313. “In any spirit that isn’t deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn’t the belief in a particular God.”

— Fernando Pessoa

314. “Life is whatever we conceive it to be.”

— Fernando Pessoa

315. “To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel – it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.”

— Fernando Pessoa

316. “Seeing and hearing are the only noble things that life contains. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close – that is true nobility.”

— Fernando Pessoa

317. “The Gods sell when they give. Glory is paid for with disgrace. Poor are the happy, for they are Just what passes.”

— Fernando Pessoa

318. “I’d like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.”

— Fernando Pessoa

319. “My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.”

— Fernando Pessoa

320. “Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake.”

— Fernando Pessoa

321. “I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

322. “I acquired, with regard to action, a transcendental honesty which, ever since I became aware of it, has inhibited me from having any strong links with the tangible world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

323. “Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.”

— Fernando Pessoa

324. “But someone afflicted by tedium feels himself the prisoner of a futile freedom, in a cell of infinite size.”

— Fernando Pessoa

325. “A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port.”

— Fernando Pessoa

326. “Knowing how easily even the smallest things torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer, how then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life?”

— Fernando Pessoa

327. “Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that gradually wanders among the worlds ruins and wastes!”

— Fernando Pessoa

328. “I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.”

— Fernando Pessoa

329. “I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit.”

— Fernando Pessoa

330. “And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.”

— Fernando Pessoa

331. “It offends me that a man can master the Devil, but not the Portuguese language.”

— Fernando Pessoa

332. “To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”

— Fernando Pessoa

333. “Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!”

— Fernando Pessoa

334. “I paced from one side of the room to the other, dreaming out loud incoherent and impossible things – deeds I’d forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would already have been. And in this reverie without grandeur or calm, in this hopeless and endless dallying, I paced away my free morning, and my words – said out loud in a low voice – multiplied in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation.”

— Fernando Pessoa

335. “Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative.”

— Fernando Pessoa

336. “I know of no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don’t need such introductions to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.”

— Fernando Pessoa

337. “Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.”

— Fernando Pessoa

338. “I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I’ll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.”

— Fernando Pessoa

339. “We know that the book we will never write will be bad. Even worse will be the one we put off writing. At least the book that has been written exists.”

— Fernando Pessoa

340. “With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.”

— Fernando Pessoa

341. “Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform.”

— Fernando Pessoa

342. “At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.”

— Fernando Pessoa

343. “Isn’t love at least a means of possessing ourselves through our sensations? Isn’t it at least a way of dreaming vividly, and therefore more gloriously, the dream that we exist?”

— Fernando Pessoa

344. “My boredom with everything has numbed me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

345. “On the other side sit we – the errand boy from around the corner, the unruly playwright William Shakespeare, the barber who tells stories, the schoolmaster John Milton, the shop assistant, the vagabond Dante Alighieri, those whom death either forgets or consecrates and whom life forgot and never consecrated.”

— Fernando Pessoa

346. “La maggior parte delle persone si ammala per non saper esprimere quello che vede e quello che pensa.”

— Fernando Pessoa

347. “What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life – me, so calm and peaceful?”

— Fernando Pessoa

348. “I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.”

— Fernando Pessoa

349. “What is art but the denial of life?”

— Fernando Pessoa

350. “To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.”

— Fernando Pessoa