Quotes by
Fernando Pessoa |
1888-1935 , Portuguese poet & writer
He was one of the greatest Portuguese poets and writers of the 20th century. Most of his work was published posthumously. He wrote frequently under heteronyms, alter egos with developed personalities, biographies, jobs, habits, attitudes, addresses, etc. | 42 quotes | 5,776 visits |
Quotations
| • | If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave. 15 |
| • | No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. 12 |
| • | Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me. 8 |
| • | There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were. 7 |
| • | Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman. 7 |
| • | Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions. 5 |
| • | My past is everything I failed to be. 5 |
| • | I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me. 5 |
| • | But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living? 5 |
| • | To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life. 4 |
| • | To be understood is to prostitute yourself. 4 |
| • | Action men are the involuntary slaves of wise men. 4 |
| • | Art consists in making others feel what we feel. 4 |
| • | Every gesture is a revolutionary act. 4 |
| • | My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. 4 |
| • | It's been a long time since I've been me. 3 |
| • | We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect. 3 |
| • | What would happen to the world if we were human? 3 |
| • | It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended. 3 |
| • | I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. 3 |
| • | Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. 3 |
| • | There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist. 3 |
| • | I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else. 3 |
| • | Writing is like paying myself a formal visit 2 |
| • | Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble. 2 |
| • | It's love that is inescapable. Sex is the merest accident. 2 |
| • | Could it think, the heart would stop beating. 2 |
| • | All beginnings are involuntary. 2 |
| • | Myth is the nothing that is everything. 2 |
| • | It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living. 2 |
| • | My life is as if you've hit me with it. 2 |
| • | What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them. 2 |
| • | What is art but the denial of life? 2 |
| • | Enthusiasm is rude. 2 |
| • | Property is not theft. It is nothing. 2 |
| • | The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. 2 |
Quotes in Verse
| • | I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world. 5 |
| • | I have no ambitions nor desires To be a poet is not my ambition, It's simply my way of being alone. 4 |
| • | God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky. 4 |
| • | We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky. 4 |
| • | God wills, man dreams, the work is born. 3 |
| • | Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom. 3 |
