Fernando Pessoa Quotes - Page 8

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In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.

Fernando Pessoa

Soul, Different, Purpose

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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

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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.

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Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Fernando Pessoa

Heart, Loss, Thinking

Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.319, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

Fernando Pessoa

Chaos, Absurd, Planets

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

Fernando Pessoa

Reality, Self, Wind

Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.235, Penguin UK

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I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

Fernando Pessoa

Numbness, Boredom, Soul

Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.172, Penguin UK

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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

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Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

Fernando Pessoa

Wasting Time

"A Factless Autobiography". Book by Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006.

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THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore.

Fernando Pessoa

Fall, Heart, Order

Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.54, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

Fernando Pessoa

Real, Book, Character

Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.47, Profile Books

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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

Humanity, This Generation, Generations

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (2002). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.304, Grove Press

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It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Fernando Pessoa

Shy, Noble, Know How

"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p. 86, 1982.

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I don't believe in the landscape.

Fernando Pessoa

Believe, Landscape, Belief

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.

Fernando Pessoa

Greatness, Want, Facts

Fernando Pessoa (2005). “The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive”

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I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

Fernando Pessoa

Thinking, Inns, Abyss

"A Factless Autobiography". Book by Richard Zenith Edition, p. 40, 2006.

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Humanitarianism is rude.

Fernando Pessoa

Rude, Humanitarianism

"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, 1982.

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Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

Fernando Pessoa

Thinking, Done, Firsts

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (2002). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.304, Grove Press

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Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do Desassossego

Fernando Pessoa

Thinking, Self, People

Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (2002). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.294, Grove Press

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There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

Fernando Pessoa

Animal, Men, Safe

"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p.150, 1982.

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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.

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Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

Fernando Pessoa

Book, Advice, Ends

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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

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All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.

Fernando Pessoa

Mean, Fate, Echoes

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Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa

Life, Time, Sadness

Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.6, Profile Books

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Fernando Pessoa

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

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