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Alberto Caeiro Quotes

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Famous Alberto Caeiro Quotes

“A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales Acts like a sick god, but like a god. Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists, He knows things exist, that he exists, He knows existing exists and doesn’t explain itself, And he knows there’s no reason at all for anything to exist. He knows being is the point. All he doesn’t know is that thought isn’t the point. (10/1/1917)”

“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.”

“What does this think about that? Nothing thinks about anything. Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants? If it did, it would be people. . . Why am I worrying about this? If I think about these things, I’ll stop seeing trees and plants And stop seeing the Earth For only seeing my thoughts... I’ll get unhappy and stay in the dark. And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky.”

“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.”

“She goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before, I go on like before, alone in the field. It’s like my head had been lowered, And if I think this, and raise my head And the golden sun dries the need to cry I can’t stop having. How vast the field and interior love... ! I look, and I forget, like dryness where there was water and trees losing their leaves.”

“Yes: I exist inside my body. I’m not carrying the sun and the moon in my pocket. I don’t want to conquer worlds because I slept badly, And I don’t want to eat the world for breakfast because I have a stomach. Indifferent? No: a son of the earth, who, if he jumps, it’s wrong, A moment in the air that’s not for us, And only happy when his feet hit the ground again, Pow! In reality where nothing’s missing! (6/20/1919)”

“The amorous shepherd has lost his staff, And his sheep are straying on the hillside, And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much. No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again. Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him. No one had loved him, in the end. When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything: The great valleys full of the same green as always, The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling, All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present. (And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs) And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest. (7/10/1930)”