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Fernando Pessoa

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Famous Fernando Pessoa Quotes

“And then there are one's friends, good fellows, good fellows, great to be with them and talk, to have lunch together, dinner together, but all of it, I don't know, so sordid and pathetic and trivial, because even on the street we remain in the fabric warehouse, even overseas we're still seated before the Cashbook, and even in infinity we still have our boss. Everyone has an office manager with a joke that's out of place, and everyone has a soul that falls outside the normal universe.”

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Book:The Book of Disquiet
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“Still others, busy on the outside of the soul, devoted themselves to the cult of noise and confusion, thinking they were living whenever they heard themselves, and supposing they loved whenever they brushed love's outward forms. Living was painful because we knew we were alive; dying didn't scare us, for we had lost the normal notion of what death is.”

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Book:The Book of Disquiet
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“And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building. I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.”

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Book:The Book of Disquiet
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“And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.”

IfsTwoIdeasDifferentSoulSeemsHateExistenceHellHorrorEternalConfusionBreathingImmortalityNothingnessGrossMixturesFascinationFear Of DeathCoffinsSatanicConfinementNon ExistenceHate Life
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.”

IfsBookSoulFactsShowsDreamWould BeLiteraturePoorTakenDuesEnvyMysteriousDespiseVersesPeersLoftyExamTranscendentalSuffocating
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.”

ThinkingWorldHas BeensSoulEndsMatterHardDoneLife IsSpiritFeltResultsJourneyMaterialsBedLaborRetiringWhat MattersContemplativeMaterial WorldEnd ResultsThinking Hard
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things”

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Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

WorldHas BeensSoulFeelingsDesireHopeHurtEmotionExistenceHalfConsciousnessImpossibleRegretEternalLongingPainfulNostalgiaAbsurdLandscapeToneSunsetYearningCould Have BeenDissatisfactionImpossible ThingsBook Of Disquiet
Book:Book of Disquietude
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“And leaning out the window, enjoying the day above the varying volume of the entire city, only one thought swells my soul – the intimate will to die, to finish, not to see more light over any city, not to think, not to feel, to leave behind like wrapping paper the course of the sun and the days, to rid myself, at the edge of the grand bed, as of a heavy suit, of the involuntary effort to be.”

ThinkingFeelsSoulLightDiesCoursesEnjoyEffortCitiesBehindsSunBedPaperWindowEdgesHeavySuitsMy SoulIntimateVolumeInvoluntaryWrappingWrapping Paper
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.”

ThinkingFeelsSoulFeelingsUniverseWalksCitiesWonderStreetsTomorrowJust OneVagueEvokeBook Of Disquiet
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”

KnowsWritingMaySoulSometimesEnoughMomentsPurposeHurtPoorMinesPlantFinishedMiserableDistractionNeighbourLoneCrippledSad Soul
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.”

IfsThinkingKnowsWorldLooksMeanIdeasSoulMomentsBodyRealityFacesSoundDarkRoomsGriefSadnessCryMovementStonesBottomInvisibleIntenseMy SoulLook UpGesturesThirstUnfamiliarFacadeQuenchDark RoomStandstill
Author:Fernando Pessoa
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“Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.”

IfsWritingSoulSelfDreamMightVoiceMy OwnRoomsWonderMillionsExpressionQuietEssenceLongingUselessHopelessSelf ExpressionResignedQuiet Room
Book:The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
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