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

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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If we knew the truth, we'd see it all else is system and outskirts.
Fernando Pessoa
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To be great, be whole Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
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Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
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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Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.
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Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.
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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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.
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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I don't mourn the loss of my childhood I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
Fernando Pessoa
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The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.
Fernando Pessoa
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If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
Fernando Pessoa
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What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.
Fernando Pessoa
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The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
Fernando Pessoa
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Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice
Fernando Pessoa
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Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
Fernando Pessoa
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Humanitarianism is rude.
Fernando Pessoa
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Nature is the difference between the soul and God.
Fernando Pessoa
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...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.
Fernando Pessoa
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Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.
Fernando Pessoa