Quote

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

Fernando Pessoa

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Fernando Pessoa
Age: 47 †
Born: 1888
Born: June 13
Died: 1935
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Lisboa
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
Alberto Caeiro
Ricardo Reis
Bernardo Soares
Pessoa
Prefer
Seriously
Naturalness
Oneself
Humanly
Understood
Prostitute
Respect
Remaining
Taken
Rejected
Always
Dues
Unknown

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
Fernando Pessoa
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What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa
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If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Fernando Pessoa
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God wills, man dreams, the work is born.
Fernando Pessoa
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And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
Fernando Pessoa
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I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa
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And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.
Fernando Pessoa
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I know nothing and my heart aches
Fernando Pessoa
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To be great, be whole Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
Fernando Pessoa
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I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
Fernando Pessoa
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Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
Fernando Pessoa
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I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.
Fernando Pessoa
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I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.
Fernando Pessoa
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If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings
Fernando Pessoa
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Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.
Fernando Pessoa
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I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
Fernando Pessoa
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Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.
Fernando Pessoa