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

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
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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I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.
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I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
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The human soul is an abyss
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In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.
Fernando Pessoa
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Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.
Fernando Pessoa
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I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.
Fernando Pessoa
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I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa
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What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
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Everything is theater.
Fernando Pessoa
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Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
Fernando Pessoa
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Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Fernando Pessoa
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In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.
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'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Fernando Pessoa
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The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.
Fernando Pessoa
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I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.
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