94 Inspirational Quotes By Fernando Pessoa, The Author Of The Book Of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa was one of the most powerful figures of the Portuguese literary world who significantly contributed to Portuguese literature of the 20th century. He was a poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher. His expansive fictional journal was not just belted out under his own name but under seventy-five other pseudonyms that he created for his works. Pessoa preferred calling them heteronyms as he believed that the word pseudonym did not capture the true essence or independent intellectual life of the names. Much unlike other notable writers who used literary personas, Pessoa gave his heteronyms a full life separate from his own, assigning each persona’s psychology, aesthetics, and politics. Coming to Pessoa’s works, during his lifetime, most of Pessoa’s considerable creative output appeared only in journals, and he published just three collections of poetry in English, ‘Antinous’, ‘Sonnets’ and ‘English Poems’. Other than this, he came up with one collection in Portuguese titled, ‘Mensagem’. However, Pessoa’s brilliance as a writer can be felt in his quotes that touch various aspects of life, such as happiness, contentment, failure, solitude, yearning, hope, regret, dreams, living, and so on. Explore this section and find out some of the most famous quotes by Fernando Pessoa.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it
My past is everything I failed to be.
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
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.
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
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
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.
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.
I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.
I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.
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!
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
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.
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
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.
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
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.
I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.
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.
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.
