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Fernando Pessoa Quotes

1888–1935 Portugal

Fernando Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously. He wrote frequently under heteronyms, alter egos with developed personalities, biographies, jobs, habits, attitudes, addresses, etc., who sometimes quoted and interacted with each other and other people.

Portugal
Poets
Translators

Also known as: Pessoa, Pessoa, Fernando

Random Fernando Pessoa quote

189 quotes

Death is a bend in the road,
To die is to slip out of view.
If I listen, I hear your steps
Existing as I exist. The earth is made of heaven.
Error has no nest.
No one has ever been lost.
All is truth and way.

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.

Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

These are Fortunate Islands,
These are lands without a place

The weariness of all illusions and of everything that illusions involve — the loss of them, the pointlessness of having them, the anticipatory weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the pain of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing how they would end.

There's a tiredness of abstract intelligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.

All beginnings are involuntary.

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 a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Fernando Pessoa (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.