“Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character — all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“It's been a long time since I've been me.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“I have found out that reading is a slavish sort of dreaming. If I must dream, why not my own dreams?”
— Fernando Pessoa
“My homeland is the portuguese language.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“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.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“Contradiction is the essence of the universe.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things.”
— Fernando Pessoa