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Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes

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Famous Fernando Pessoa Quotes

“Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.”

KnowsWorldHappensLawSecretWatchesMysteryGoes OnShadowForgottenThings HappenVisibleBroadsUsualOblivionTransformingDaylightOtherness
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“The idea of any social obligation ... just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.”

WellsIdeasRealSometimesHappensSocialSleepCasesWorryAffairObligationRepeatsJustifyMy ThoughtsInsignificantSleep WellSocial Obligation
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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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.”

WantKindEndsFactsGreatnessCertaintyRememberedIncapacity
Book:The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
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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.”

ThinkingFirstsDoneProblemActionLife IsValuesForgetHavensFunctionPropertyIndividualismStatic
Book:The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
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“My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.”

ThinkingWantDreamHoursLosesGrowingAwarenessMereSurfaceAbsurdBitternessVegetablesExtinctionMossSavourWithout A Trace
Book:The Book of Disquiet
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“A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.”

WritingArtHandsSpiritThreeStrongFeltEmotionBloodDesignProduceColdBasesIntellectSelfishSincerityRemembranceGraphicGraphic DesignGreat PoetInsincerityGreat PoetryCongestionDeep Emotions
Book:Always Astonished: Selected Prose
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