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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Understood
Prostitute
Respect
Remaining
Taken
Rejected
Always
Dues
Unknown
Prefer
Seriously
Naturalness
Oneself
Humanly

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Image
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
Image
After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
To be great, be whole Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul
Fernando Pessoa
Image
God wills, man dreams, the work is born.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Let's buy books so as not to read them let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there let's take long walks because we're sick of walking and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.
Fernando Pessoa