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The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

Book by Alberto Caeiro · 16 quotes · Paganism, Pantheism, Clarity

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The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro Quotes

“If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, And Spring came the day after tomorrow, I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow. If that’s its time, when else should it come? I like it that everything is real and everything is right; And I like that it would be like this even if I didn’t like it. And so, if I die now, I die peacefully Because everything is real and everything is right.”

“And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything. Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow? If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died. Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them, But if I weren’t in the world, The world would be different — There would be me the less — And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm. No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls. (7/10/1930)”

“Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field There passes for a moment the figure of a man. His steps go with “him” in the same reality, But I look at him and them, and they’re two things: The “man” goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign, And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk. I see him from a distance without any opinion at all. How perfect that he is in him what he is — his body, His true reality which doesn’t have desires or hopes, But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them.”

“I was born subject like others to errors and defects, But never to the error of wanting to understand too much, Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect.. Never to the defect of demanding of the World That it be anything that’s not the World.”

“He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others! He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs, And isn’t cured from the outside, Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink, Or a trunk not having iron bands! There being injustice is like there being death.”