Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It’s like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness.”

— 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. “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

304. “The chill of what I won’t feel gnaws at my present heart.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

306. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

308. “Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

314. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

325. “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

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. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

337. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

339. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

341. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

343. “I belong to a generation – assuming that this generation includes others besides me – that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.”

— Fernando Pessoa

344. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

346. “There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

348. “Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.”

— Fernando Pessoa

349. “It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable.”

— Fernando Pessoa

350. “Wasting time has an esthetics to it.”

— Fernando Pessoa