110+ Fernando Pessoa Quotes On Poetic, Surrealistic And Philosophical

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer and literary critic. He is one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century and is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. Pessoa wrote under various pseudonyms, most notably Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Fernando Pessoa on love, life, poetic.

Top 10 Fernando Pessoa Quotes

1. The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
2. Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
3. The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
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.
5. We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
6. 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.
7. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.
8. I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.
9. I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.
10. 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

Fernando Pessoa Short Quotes

• I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
• Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.
• Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.
• We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.
• I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
• I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.
• Strength without agility is a mere mass.
• In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
• Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
• I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Love

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. — Fernando Pessoa

I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables! — Fernando Pessoa

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.) — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Life

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful. — Fernando Pessoa

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. — Fernando Pessoa

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted. — Fernando Pessoa

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns. — Fernando Pessoa

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life. — Fernando Pessoa

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating. — Fernando Pessoa

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life. — Fernando Pessoa

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation. — Fernando Pessoa

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful? — Fernando Pessoa

All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life. — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Philosophical

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars. — Fernando Pessoa

If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls. — Fernando Pessoa

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. — Fernando Pessoa

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable. — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Idea

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. — Fernando Pessoa

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it — Fernando Pessoa

Faithful to the word given and the idea had. — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Stupidity

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.] — Fernando Pessoa

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt. — Fernando Pessoa

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Intelligent

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths? — Fernando Pessoa

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul. — Fernando Pessoa

pg 9, "The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. — Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Famous Quotes And Sayings

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything. — Fernando Pessoa

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect. — Fernando Pessoa

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves — Fernando Pessoa

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way. — Fernando Pessoa

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. 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. — Fernando Pessoa

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words. — Fernando Pessoa

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps. — Fernando Pessoa

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction. — Fernando Pessoa

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me. — Fernando Pessoa

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. — Fernando Pessoa

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void. — Fernando Pessoa

For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful — Fernando Pessoa

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays. — Fernando Pessoa

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. — Fernando Pessoa

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness — Fernando Pessoa

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror. — Fernando Pessoa

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet. — Fernando Pessoa

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing. — Fernando Pessoa

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone. — Fernando Pessoa

Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal? — Fernando Pessoa

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. — Fernando Pessoa

I don't believe in the landscape. — Fernando Pessoa

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built. — Fernando Pessoa

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad. — Fernando Pessoa

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. — Fernando Pessoa

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room. — Fernando Pessoa

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. — Fernando Pessoa

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul. — Fernando Pessoa

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living. — Fernando Pessoa

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. — Fernando Pessoa

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest. — Fernando Pessoa

I know not what tomorrow will bring. — Fernando Pessoa

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were. — Fernando Pessoa

THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore. — Fernando Pessoa

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day. — Fernando Pessoa

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living. — Fernando Pessoa

After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts. — Fernando Pessoa

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want. — Fernando Pessoa

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. Livro Do Desassossego — Fernando Pessoa

The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own — Fernando Pessoa

Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul. — Fernando Pessoa

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

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe. — Fernando Pessoa

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said. — Fernando Pessoa

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. — Fernando Pessoa

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold! — Fernando Pessoa

Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes. — Fernando Pessoa

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese. — Fernando Pessoa

Fraternity has subtleties. — Fernando Pessoa

Art consists in making others feel what we feel. — Fernando Pessoa

Everything is absurd. — Fernando Pessoa

And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself. — Fernando Pessoa

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. — Fernando Pessoa

We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans. — Fernando Pessoa

One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard. — Fernando Pessoa

pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation. — Fernando Pessoa

Life is good, but Wine is better. — Fernando Pessoa

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth. — Fernando Pessoa

We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong. — Fernando Pessoa

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one. — Fernando Pessoa

My joy is as painful as my pain. — Fernando Pessoa

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing. — Fernando Pessoa

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! — Fernando Pessoa

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination. — Fernando Pessoa

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

I know nothing and my heart aches — Fernando Pessoa

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it. — Fernando Pessoa

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things! — Fernando Pessoa

I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul — Fernando Pessoa

In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god. — Fernando Pessoa

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial. — Fernando Pessoa

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living? — Fernando Pessoa

As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written). — Fernando Pessoa

Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be. — Fernando Pessoa

Life Lessons by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa's work teaches us to be open to change and to embrace the unknown. He emphasizes the importance of living in the moment, and encourages us to think outside the box and to be creative. His writing also reminds us to be mindful of our own mortality, and to make the most of our lives while we can.