Top 450 Fernando Pessoa Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

410. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

415. “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

416. “My curiosity sister of larks.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

428. “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

429. “Durmo e desdurmo.”

— Fernando Pessoa

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

434. “Art lies because it’s social.”

— Fernando Pessoa

435. “The belief that the main task in life is obtaining freedom from the tyranny of ‘social fictions’. Money is the most important social fiction; one escapes its tyranny by acquiring it.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

439. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

441. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

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

— Fernando Pessoa

449. “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

450. “With Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.”

— Fernando Pessoa