Home > Author > Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa QUOTES

1 " There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

2 " 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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

3 " 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. "

― Fernando Pessoa , Poems of Fernando Pessoa

4 " Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

5 " Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

6 " 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! "

― Fernando Pessoa

7 " I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...
If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Keeper of Sheep

8 " A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

9 " Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

10 " To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above. "

― Fernando Pessoa , Poems of Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa QUOTES

11 " She’s a manner of speaking.
Even the flowers don’t come back, or the green leaves.
There are new flowers, new green leaves.
There are other beautiful days.
Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

12 " To love is to think.
And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.
I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her.
I have a great animated distraction.
When I want to meet her,
I almost feel like not meeting her,
So I don’t have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her.
I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.
I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think. "

― Fernando Pessoa , O Pastor Amoroso

13 " What comes, when it comes, will be what it is. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

14 " If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
And Spring came the day after tomorrow,
I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow.
If that’s its time, when else should it come?
I like it that everything is real and everything is right;
And I like that it would be like this even if I didn’t like it.
And so, if I die now, I die peacefully
Because everything is real and everything is right. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

15 " I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

16 " I'm one of my sensations. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

17 " Accept the universe
As the gods gave it to you.
If the gods wanted to give you something else
They’d have done it.

If there are other matters and other worlds
There are. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

18 " And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.
Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?
If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow
Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died.
Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them,
But if I weren’t in the world,
The world would be different —
There would be me the less —
And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.
No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls.

(7/10/1930) "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

19 " It’s stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there’s nothing to understand. "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Keeper of Sheep

20 " The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset? "

― Fernando Pessoa , The Keeper of Sheep