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
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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
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.
To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
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.
For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful
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.
…to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect…
The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.
To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.