Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

353. “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

354. “Wise is the man who monotonizes his existence, for then each minor incident seems a marvel.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

356. “Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

358. “I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

359. “The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn’t weigh like a load of jewels.”

— Fernando Pessoa

360. “It all comes down to trying to experience tedium in a way that does not hurt.”

— Fernando Pessoa

361. “If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I’ll take And for truth commune with imaginings.”

— Fernando Pessoa

362. “To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.”

— Fernando Pessoa

363. “To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character – all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.”

— Fernando Pessoa

364. “It’s been months since I last wrote. I’ve lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I’ve felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven’t existed. I’ve been someone else. I’ve lived without thinking.”

— Fernando Pessoa

365. “I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer... I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad.”

— Fernando Pessoa

366. “I’m sure that all this, I mean other people’s attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.”

— Fernando Pessoa

367. “Other people’s understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.”

— Fernando Pessoa

368. “His voice was dull and tremulous, the voice of one who hopes for nothing, because all hope is vain.”

— Fernando Pessoa

369. “All beginnings are involuntary.”

— Fernando Pessoa

370. “Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom.”

— Fernando Pessoa

371. “He was constitutionally condemned to suffer all kinds of anxieties, but fated to abandon them all. I never met a more extraordinary man. He had abdicated everything to which he was by nature destined, but not out of any kind of asceticism. Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.”

— Fernando Pessoa

372. “No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, enisled in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However hard one soul struggles to know another soul, he can only judge by what words are spoken – a formless shadow on the floor of his understanding.”

— Fernando Pessoa

373. “But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.”

— Fernando Pessoa

374. “We should be content with the incomprehensibility of the universe; the desire to understand makes us less than human, for to be human is to know that one does not understand.”

— Fernando Pessoa

375. “The only intellectual attitude worthy of a superior creature is a feeling of calm, cool compassion for everything that is not himself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

376. “My self-critical mind allows me to see only the defects and faults in my own work, and so I only have the courage to write snippets and snatches, brief notes on the theme of nonexistence, and yet even the little I write is imperfect.”

— Fernando Pessoa

377. “Reality is made up of what is common and shared. That’s why we as individuals only exist in the spurious part of our sensations.”

— Fernando Pessoa

378. “One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.”

— Fernando Pessoa

379. “Whole months have passed during which I haven’t lived, but have merely endured, caught between the office and physiology, marooned in an inner stagnation of thinking and feeling. Alas, this is not a restful state to be in, for putrefaction inevitably involves fermentation.”

— Fernando Pessoa

380. “If we knew the truth, we’d see it; all else is system and outskirts.”

— Fernando Pessoa

381. “Being eternally at a point where two paths fork!”

— Fernando Pessoa

382. “The existence of laws for the association of ideas, as for all intellectual operations, insults our native indiscipline.”

— Fernando Pessoa

383. “I find the slightest action impossible, as if it were some heroic deed. The mere thought of making the smallest gesture weighs on me as if it were something I was actually considering doing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

384. “And when the lie begins to give us pleasure, let us speak the truth in order to lie to the lie.”

— Fernando Pessoa

385. “The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions!”

— Fernando Pessoa

386. “I forget. I don’t see. I don’t think.”

— Fernando Pessoa

387. “I sleep and unsleep.”

— Fernando Pessoa

388. “The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.”

— Fernando Pessoa

389. “Having touched Christ’s feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.”

— Fernando Pessoa

390. “I never go to where’s a risk. I’m frightened of dangers down to boredom.”

— Fernando Pessoa

391. “Deze bladzijden, waarop ik dingen noteer die slechts helder voor me zijn terwijl ik ze schrijf, heb ik juist herlezen en nu vraag ik mij af: wat is dit en waar dient dit voor? Wie ben ik wanneer ik voel? Wat sterft in mij wanneer ik ben? Zoals iemand die van grote hoogte het leven in een dal tracht te zien, zo beschouw ik mijzelf vanaf een bergtop en ben daarbij een onduidelijk rommelig landschap.”

— Fernando Pessoa

392. “One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.”

— Fernando Pessoa

393. “The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!”

— Fernando Pessoa

394. “Believing that each step of my life would mean contact with the horror of the New and that each new person I met was a new and living fragment of the unknown to be placed before me on the table for my daily horrified contemplation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go nowhere, to reduce action to the minimum, to avoid as far as possible meeting either men or events, to perfect abstinence and cultivate renunciation. That’s how much living frightens and torments me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

395. “Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.”

— Fernando Pessoa

396. “I don’t complain about the horrors of life. I complain only about the horrors of my life. The only important fact for me is the fact that I exist and that I suffer and cannot entirely dream myself out of feeling that suffering.”

— Fernando Pessoa

397. “I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.”

— Fernando Pessoa

398. “To conceive of myself from the outside was my ruin – the ruin of my happiness. I saw myself as others see me, and I despised myself – not because I had character traits that made me worthy of contempt, but because I saw myself through the eyes of others, and felt the contempt they feel towards me. I experienced the humiliation of knowing myself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

399. “Literature simulates life. A novel is a history of what never was and a play is a novel without narrative. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, since no one speaks in verse.”

— Fernando Pessoa

400. “There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.”

— Fernando Pessoa