Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.

— Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Quotes

The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.

— Fernando Pessoa

I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit.

— Fernando Pessoa

The basest of all human needs is the need to confide, to confess. It is the soul’s need to go outside itself.

— Fernando Pessoa

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things that life contains. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close – that is true nobility.

— Fernando Pessoa

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

— Fernando Pessoa

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.

— Fernando Pessoa

Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief.

— Fernando Pessoa

Who knows for what supreme forces – gods or demons of Truth in whose shadow we roam – I may be nothing but a shiny fly that alights in front of them for a moment or two? A facile hypothesis? Trite observation? Philosophy with no real thought? Maybe. But I didn’t think: I felt. It was carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror that I made this ludicrous comparison.

— Fernando Pessoa

I find the slightest action impossible, as if it were some heroic deed. The mere thought of making the smallest gesture weighs on me as if it were something I was actually considering doing.

— Fernando Pessoa

How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life’s purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

— Fernando Pessoa

Twice in my adolescence – which I feel so remotely it seems like someone else’s story that I read or was told – I enjoyed the humiliating pain of being in love.

— Fernando Pessoa

To observe oneself as one observes nature; to gaze on one’s impressions as one would on a field – that is true wisdom.

— Fernando Pessoa

Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune.

— Fernando Pessoa

We do not possess our sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.

— Fernando Pessoa

My life is so sad, and yet I do not even consider weeping over it; my hours are so false, and I do not even dream the gesture that might end them.

— Fernando Pessoa

To belong to something – that’s banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

— Fernando Pessoa

Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.

— Fernando Pessoa

Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language.

— Fernando Pessoa

In everything I am an intense, rather coarse dilettante.

— Fernando Pessoa

Other people’s understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.

— Fernando Pessoa
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