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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

Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

My homeland is the Portuguese language.

To be great, be whole; don't exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you,
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.

I aspire to nothing. Life hurts me. I’m not well where I am nor anywhere else I can think of being.

I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.

Without madness what is man
more than the healthy beast,
corpse adjourned that procreates?

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.

I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.

I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

Attribution

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