Quotations
- The poet is a faker
Who's so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
- I am nothing.
I will never be anything.
I cannot wish to be anything.
Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
- Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
- My nation is the Portuguese language.
- 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.
- I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that
aren't attached.
- My past is everything I failed to be.
- We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in
childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false,
the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we
end up by being put in a coffin.
- To have opinions is to sell out to yourself.
To have no opinions is to exist.
To have every opinion is to be a poet.
- I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt
something else, that I thought something else.
What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the
show I'm attending is myself.
- But I am not perfect in my way of putting things. Because
I lack the divine simplicity of being only what I appear to be.
- In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes
find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago.
And many of the seem to me written by a stranger:
I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person
who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life,
from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
- There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in
the street.
There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly
than many men and women.
There are phrases from literary works that have a positively
human personality.
There are passages from my own writing that chill me with
fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they
appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows…
I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or
silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that
acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.
- To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a
cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not
love.)
- To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself
badly is to think.
- Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.
So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who
suffers or takes joy in them.
In the vast colony of our being there are many species of
people who think and feel in different ways.
- In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is
made of resignation.
- Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.
- There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist.
- I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know
what to think or what I am.
- I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that
could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.
- Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them I shall build
my castle.
- Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t
come.
- Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to
concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long
walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country,
just because it bores us.
Fernando Pessoa
(June 13, 1888,
Lisbon – November 30,
1935, Lisbon),
Fernando Pessoa was
a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of
the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the
greatest poets in the Portuguese language.
