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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

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
Matter
Dereliction
Inaction
Metaphysical
Strikes
Mistake
Live

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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I know nothing and my heart aches
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.
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I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
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Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
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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Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.
Fernando Pessoa
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The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
Fernando Pessoa
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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
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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 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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I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
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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Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
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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These pages are not my confession they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.
Fernando Pessoa
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Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
Fernando Pessoa
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Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?
Fernando Pessoa
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That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.
Fernando Pessoa
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To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.
Fernando Pessoa