Fernando Pessoa

“Minha pátria é a língua portuguesa”

— Fernando Pessoa

Life is good, but Wine is better.

— Fernando Pessoa

“To live is to not think.”

— Fernando Pessoa

“Sou do tamanho do que vejo!”

— Fernando Pessoa

To think is to destroy.

— Fernando Pessoa

All beginnings are involuntary.

— Fernando Pessoa

“L'oppio ce l'ho nell'anima.”

— Fernando Pessoa

Art lies because it's social.

— Fernando Pessoa

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

— Fernando Pessoa

The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

— Fernando Pessoa

“I take comfort in these reflections, since I can’t take comfort in life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

— Fernando Pessoa

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

— Fernando Pessoa

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.

— Fernando Pessoa

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

— Fernando Pessoa

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

— Fernando Pessoa

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

— Fernando Pessoa

“I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest.”

— Fernando Pessoa

“The country morning exists; the city morning promises. The former makes one live; the latter makes one think.”

— Fernando Pessoa

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

— Fernando Pessoa

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing…

— Fernando Pessoa

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

— Fernando Pessoa

“Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.”

— Fernando Pessoa

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and…

— Fernando Pessoa

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor…

— Fernando Pessoa

“I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the…

— Fernando Pessoa

“Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life…

— Fernando Pessoa

“Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a…

— Fernando Pessoa

“The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering-the long and the slow kind-has the intimate yellow which…

— Fernando Pessoa

Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's…

— Fernando Pessoa

There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness,…

— Fernando Pessoa

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards…

— Fernando Pessoa

“May I at least carry, to the boundless possibility contained in the abyss of everything, the glory of my disillusion like that…

— Fernando Pessoa

When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes…

— Fernando Pessoa

“How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By performing our daily duties but living, simultaneously, in the imagination. Travelling…

— Fernando Pessoa

“O exemplo máximo do homem prático, porque reúne a extrema concentração da acção com a sua extrema importância, é a do estratégico.…

— Fernando Pessoa

“Sem a loucura que é o homem Mais que a besta sadia, Cadáver adiado que procria?" O sonho é ver as formas…

— Fernando Pessoa

“I’ve always been treated in a friendly manner, and even people I hardly know have rarely been rude or brusque or cold…

— Fernando Pessoa

“And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a…

— Fernando Pessoa

“Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life…

— Fernando Pessoa