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To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
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
Badly
Live
Nothing
Think
Thinking
More quotes by Fernando Pessoa
I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
Fernando Pessoa
I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!
Fernando Pessoa
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
Fernando Pessoa
Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!
Fernando Pessoa
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Fernando Pessoa
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Fernando Pessoa
Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
Fernando Pessoa
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
Humanitarianism is rude.
Fernando Pessoa
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
Literature exists because the world isn't enough.
Fernando Pessoa
I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
Fernando Pessoa
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
Fernando Pessoa
Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.
Fernando Pessoa
The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.
Fernando Pessoa
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa
We worship perfection because we can't have it if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
Fernando Pessoa
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
Fernando Pessoa
But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.
Fernando Pessoa
Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.
Fernando Pessoa
