Quote

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

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
Else
Barbarians
Dream
Cultivation
Nothing
Relentless
Like
Prevent
Personality
Degenerating
Rest
Captivate
Age
Analyse
Ability
Metallic

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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Literature exists because the world isn't enough.
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To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
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If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
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I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
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My past is everything I failed to be.
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The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
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It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.
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The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
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I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
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We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.
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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.
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Strength without agility is a mere mass.
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There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
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I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
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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I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Fernando Pessoa
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There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.
Fernando Pessoa
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Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.
Fernando Pessoa
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Humanitarianism is rude.
Fernando Pessoa
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There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
Fernando Pessoa