Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French...
NationalityPortuguese
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth13 June 1888
CityLisbon, Portugal
CountryPortugal
To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
My past is everything I failed to be.
Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]
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.
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
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.
I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.