Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

About Fernando Pessoa:

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminab...

Fernando Pessoa

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which b...

Fernando Pessoa

My past is everything I failed to be.

Fernando Pessoa

I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted - and nothing in which I’ve placed, eve...

Fernando Pessoa

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Fernando Pessoa

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.

Fernando Pessoa

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, yo...

Fernando Pessoa

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and bl...

Fernando Pessoa

O que parece haver de desprezo entre homem e homem, de indiferente que permite que se mate gente sem que se sinta que se mata, como entre os assassinos, ou sem que se pense que se está matando, como entre os soldados, é que ninguém presta a devida...

Fernando Pessoa

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

Fernando Pessoa

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.

Fernando Pessoa

Anonymous > Quotes > Quotable Quote “I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compe...

Fernando Pessoa

Há um cansaço da inteligência abstracta, e é o mais horroroso dos cansaços. Não pesa como o cansaço do corpo, nem inquieta como o cansaço do conhecimento pela emoção. É um peso da consciência do mundo, um não poder respirar com a alma.

Fernando Pessoa

O tédio é, sim, o aborrecimento do mundo, o mal-estar de estar vivendo, o cansaço de se ter vivido; o tédio é, deveras, a sensação carnal da vacuidade prolixa das coisas. Mas o tédio é, mais do que isto, o aborrecimento de outros mundos, que...

Fernando Pessoa

Desenrolo-me como uma meada multicolor, ou faço comigo figuras de cordel, como as que se tecem nas mãos espetadas e se passam de umas crianças para as outras. Cuido só de que o polegar não falhe o laço que lhe compete. Depois viro a mão e a im...

Fernando Pessoa

De resto, com que posso contar comigo? Uma acuidade horrível das sensações, e a compreensão profunda de estar sentindo... Uma inteligência aguda para me destruir, e um poder de sonho sôfrego de me entreter... Uma vontade morta e uma reflexão q...

Fernando Pessoa

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

Fernando Pessoa

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I ...

Fernando Pessoa

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their d...

Fernando Pessoa

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

Fernando Pessoa

Author Bio

  • NameFernando Pessoa
  • DescriptionPortuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
  • AliasesFernando António Nogueira Pessoa
  • BornJune 13, 1888
  • DiedNovember 30, 1935
  • CountryPortugal
  • ProfessionPoet; Translator; Writer; Playwright; Philosopher; Essayist
  • WorksThe Book Of Disquiet