Fernando Pessoa on Philosophy
1888–1935 Portugal
← All quotes by Fernando Pessoa
7 quotes
Living seems to me a metaphysical mistake on the part of matter, an oversight on the part of inaction.
Whatever the case, it would have been better not to be born.
Everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep.
I aspire to nothing. Life hurts me. I’m not well where I am nor anywhere else I can think of being.
(Eat your chocolates, little girl,
Eat your chocolates!
Believe me, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates,
And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop.
Eat, dirty little girl, eat!
If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you!
But I think and, removing the silver paper that's tinfoil,
I throw it all on the ground, as I've thrown out life.)
Tabacaria (1928)
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.
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.