Why try to be like others if you’re condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it’s of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don’t?

— Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes

We should wash our destiny the way we wash our body, and change life the way we change clothes – not to preserve life, as when we eat and sleep, but out of objective respect for ourselves, which is what personal hygiene is all about.

— Fernando Pessoa

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that’s true nobility.

— Pessoa Fernando

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, enisled in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However hard one soul struggles to know another soul, he can only judge by what words are spoken – a formless shadow on the floor of his understanding.

— Fernando Pessoa

My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life’s surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

— Pessoa Fernando

Teach nothing, for you still have everything to learn.

— Fernando Pessoa

There is something of my own disquiet in the steady drip and patter by which the day vainly empties out its sadness upon the earth.

— Fernando Pessoa

It takes a certain intellectual courage for a man to frankly recognize that he’s nothing more than a human tatter, an abortion that survived, a madman not mad enough to be committed; and once he recognizes this, it takes even more moral courage to devise a way of adapting to his destiny, to accept without protest and without resignation, without any gesture or hint of a gesture, the organic curse imposed on him by Nature.

— Fernando Pessoa

I’ll always be the one who waited for a door to open in a wall without doors.

— Fernando Pessoa

I have always found my awareness of suffering more painful than the suffering itself.

— Fernando Pessoa

I should explain that I really did travel, but everything smacks to me of merely telling myself that I travelled, although I didn’t. I carried back and forth, from north to south and east to west, the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living a present, and the tedium of having to have a future. And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future.

— Fernando Pessoa

To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that’s both excessive and uncomfortable. While it’s true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we’re not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we’re like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.

— Fernando Pessoa

Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel tired, and I’ve decided to write no more, think no more. I’ll let the fever of saying put me to sleep instead, and with closed eyes I’ll stroke, as if petting a cat, all that I might have said.

— Fernando Pessoa

I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

— Fernando Pessoa

The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness of the sad.

— Fernando Pessoa

The belief that the main task in life is obtaining freedom from the tyranny of ‘social fictions’. Money is the most important social fiction; one escapes its tyranny by acquiring it.

— Fernando Pessoa

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others.

— Fernando Pessoa

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.

— Fernando Pessoa

With Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.

— Fernando Pessoa

We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.

— Fernando Pessoa

Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

— Fernando Pessoa
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