99+ Fernando Pessoa Quotes on Literature, Longing and Humour - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Fernando Pessoa quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Fernando Pessoa quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Fernando Pessoa wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Literature, Longing and Humour

Twice in my adolescence – which I feel so remotely it seems like someone else’s story that I read or was told – I enjoyed the humiliating pain of being in love.

Life would be unbearable if we made ourselves conscious of it.

I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer... I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad.

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

We do not possess our sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.

Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief.

Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune.

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language.

Teach nothing, for you still have everything to learn.

The basest of all human needs is the need to confide, to confess. It is the soul’s need to go outside itself.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, enisled in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However hard one soul struggles to know another soul, he can only judge by what words are spoken – a formless shadow on the floor of his understanding.

There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.

Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I have been everything, nothing is worth anything.

Art lies because it’s social.

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things that life contains. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close – that is true nobility.

Heine said that every great tragedy was followed by a general blowing of noses. As a Jew, he saw all too clearly the universal nature of humanity.

Other people’s understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.

However, when you’re about to write something, knowing beforehand that it’s sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory.

What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life?

To conceive of myself from the outside was my ruin – the ruin of my happiness. I saw myself as others see me, and I despised myself – not because I had character traits that made me worthy of contempt, but because I saw myself through the eyes of others, and felt the contempt they feel towards me. I experienced the humiliation of knowing myself.

Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit.

There is something of my own disquiet in the steady drip and patter by which the day vainly empties out its sadness upon the earth.

We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.

Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And.

The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions!

I weep over a dead life that I carry inside me and never lived.

To observe oneself as one observes nature; to gaze on one’s impressions as one would on a field – that is true wisdom.

He was constitutionally condemned to suffer all kinds of anxieties, but fated to abandon them all. I never met a more extraordinary man. He had abdicated everything to which he was by nature destined, but not out of any kind of asceticism. Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.

My curiosity sister of larks.

It’s the fact that in all this – sky, earth, world – there is never anything but myself!

And when the lie begins to give us pleasure, let us speak the truth in order to lie to the lie.

How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life’s purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

His voice was dull and tremulous, the voice of one who hopes for nothing, because all hope is vain.

The only intellectual attitude worthy of a superior creature is a feeling of calm, cool compassion for everything that is not himself.

I acquired, with regard to action, a transcendental honesty which, ever since I became aware of it, has inhibited me from having any strong links with the tangible world.

One man reads in order to know, all in vain. Another enjoys himself in order to live, again all in vain.

Comme d’usage, le Dictateur se trompe.

I know of no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don’t need such introductions to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.

Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative.

Knowing how easily even the smallest things torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer, how then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life?

Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.

I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.

There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.

Literature simulates life. A novel is a history of what never was and a play is a novel without narrative. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, since no one speaks in verse.

Reality is made up of what is common and shared. That’s why we as individuals only exist in the spurious part of our sensations.

The existence of laws for the association of ideas, as for all intellectual operations, insults our native indiscipline.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!