Fernando Pessoa
197 quotes
Biography
"Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built."
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
"There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful."
"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. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached."
"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony."
"To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above."
"I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted."
"The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!"
"If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine."
"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."
"Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!"
"We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong."
"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many."
"My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool."
"المرآة تعكس بدقة متناهية دون أن تخطئ ابداَ . لأنها وبكل بساطة لا تفكر"
"Descobri que a leitura é uma forma servil de sonhar. Se tenho de sonhar, porque não sonhar os meus próprios sonhos?"
"A essência do universo é a contradição."
"Todo o homem que merece ser célebre sabe que não vale a pena sê-lo."
"Fingir é conhecer-se."
"A metafísica é uma consequência de estar mal disposto."
"O meu coração é um pouco maior que o universo inteiro."
"Sê plural como o universo!"
"O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia."
"O meu passado é tudo quanto não consegui ser."
"Não há nenhuma ideia inteligente que possa ganhar aceitação geral sem ser misturada antes com um pouco de estupidez."