Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.”

— Fernando Pessoa

402. “One man reads in order to know, all in vain. Another enjoys himself in order to live, again all in vain.”

— Fernando Pessoa

403. “To observe oneself as one observes nature; to gaze on one’s impressions as one would on a field – that is true wisdom.”

— Fernando Pessoa

404. “I weep over a dead life that I carry inside me and never lived.”

— Fernando Pessoa

405. “And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that’s just another kind of dream.”

— Fernando Pessoa

406. “How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life’s purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?”

— Fernando Pessoa

407. “My curiosity sister of larks.”

— Fernando Pessoa

408. “A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things – all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?”

— Fernando Pessoa

409. “Comme d’usage, le Dictateur se trompe.”

— Fernando Pessoa

410. “What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life?”

— Fernando Pessoa

411. “As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.”

— Fernando Pessoa

412. “There is something of my own disquiet in the steady drip and patter by which the day vainly empties out its sadness upon the earth.”

— Fernando Pessoa

413. “It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot.”

— Fernando Pessoa

414. “I do not even abdicate from the banal gestures of life from which I so wish I could abdicate. Abdication takes effort, and I do not have enough soul to make that effort.”

— Fernando Pessoa

415. “It’s the fact that in all this – sky, earth, world – there is never anything but myself!”

— Fernando Pessoa

416. “Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And.”

— Fernando Pessoa

417. “I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die.”

— Fernando Pessoa

418. “The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without. There’s no room on the pinnacle except for the man himself. The more perfect he is, the more complete; and the more complete, the less other.”

— Fernando Pessoa

419. “I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway house between things, like myself, that are nothing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

420. “However, when you’re about to write something, knowing beforehand that it’s sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory.”

— Fernando Pessoa

421. “Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language.”

— Fernando Pessoa

422. “I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower.”

— Fernando Pessoa

423. “Durmo e desdurmo.”

— Fernando Pessoa

424. “We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.”

— Fernando Pessoa

425. “That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations. The presence of others – always such an unexpected event for the soul – grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble. I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can’t look reality in the eye.”

— Fernando Pessoa

426. “The basest of all human needs is the need to confide, to confess. It is the soul’s need to go outside itself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

427. “Heine said that every great tragedy was followed by a general blowing of noses. As a Jew, he saw all too clearly the universal nature of humanity.”

— Fernando Pessoa

428. “All that I’ve lived I’ve forgotten, as if I’d vaguely heard it. All that I’ll be reminds me of nothing, as if I’d lived and forgotten it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

429. “All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.”

— Fernando Pessoa

430. “Art lies because it’s social.”

— Fernando Pessoa

431. “To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that’s both excessive and uncomfortable. While it’s true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we’re not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we’re like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.”

— Fernando Pessoa

432. “There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.”

— Fernando Pessoa

433. “I’ll always be the one who waited for a door to open in a wall without doors.”

— Fernando Pessoa

434. “Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.”

— Fernando Pessoa

435. “Civilization consists in giving something a name that doesn’t belong to it and then dreaming over the result.”

— Fernando Pessoa

436. “Twice in my adolescence – which I feel so remotely it seems like someone else’s story that I read or was told – I enjoyed the humiliating pain of being in love.”

— Fernando Pessoa

437. “The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.”

— Fernando Pessoa

438. “Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune.”

— Fernando Pessoa

439. “I have always found my awareness of suffering more painful than the suffering itself.”

— Fernando Pessoa

440. “Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel tired, and I’ve decided to write no more, think no more. I’ll let the fever of saying put me to sleep instead, and with closed eyes I’ll stroke, as if petting a cat, all that I might have said.”

— Fernando Pessoa

441. “Life would be unbearable if we made ourselves conscious of it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

442. “The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men.”

— Fernando Pessoa

443. “Teach nothing, for you still have everything to learn.”

— Fernando Pessoa

444. “Where’s your tambourine, O bear that just stands there?”

— Fernando Pessoa

445. “I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights.”

— Fernando Pessoa

446. “We do not possess our sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.”

— Fernando Pessoa

447. “We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.”

— Fernando Pessoa

448. “The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness of the sad.”

— Fernando Pessoa

449. “I don’t remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don’t remember.”

— Fernando Pessoa

450. “To belong to something – that’s banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.”

— Fernando Pessoa