Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Dreams

Quotes about: Dreams

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Tired, Sleep

Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.70, Profile Books
I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Real, Done

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Silence, Hopeless
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. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Children, Distance

"The Book of Disquiet".
My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Thinking, Vegetables

Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.50, Profile Books
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Writing, Voice

Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.321, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Book, Character

Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.24, Profile Books
I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, World, Want
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Two, Childhood
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Writing, Years
Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Real, Sleep

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Character, Quality

Fernando Pessoa (2005). “The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive”
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Stupid, Umbrella

"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, 1982.
Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Done, Wonder

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited
If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Wall, Philosophical
One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Philosophy, Philosophical

"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p. 255, 1982.
What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Reading, Book
The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Morning, Stars
When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Witty, Clever

Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.69, Penguin UK
What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Children, Book
In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Personality, Age
My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Book, Taken
All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Grief, Self

Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.194, Profile Books
Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Looks, Sake
Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Sleep, Thinking

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Born: June 13, 1888
Died: November 30, 1935
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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