Fernando Pessoa quotes

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher, renowned for his literary innovation and the use of heteronyms. His deeply introspective works have had a profound impact on modernist literature. He is celebrated as one of Portugal’s greatest literary figures. Here are 290 of his quotes:

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life. (Fernando Pessoa)
Could it think, the heart would stop beating. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
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. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Myth is the nothing that is everything. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Was it worthwhile? Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
To be understood is to prostitute oneself. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue. (Fernando Pessoa)
Faithful to the word given and the idea had. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night, they're full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
For I am the size of what I see not my height's size. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended. (Fernando Pessoa)
There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
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. View quote
Fernando Pessoa