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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
Nothing
Think
Thinking
Badly
Live
More quotes by Fernando Pessoa
Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.
Fernando Pessoa
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
To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
Fernando Pessoa
Everything is absurd.
Fernando Pessoa
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
Fernando Pessoa
Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.
Fernando Pessoa
THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore.
Fernando Pessoa
My curiosity sister of larks.
Fernando Pessoa
Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.
Fernando Pessoa
Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?
Fernando Pessoa
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
Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do Desassossego
Fernando Pessoa
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
If we knew the truth, we'd see it all else is system and outskirts.
Fernando Pessoa
To be great, be whole Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
Fernando Pessoa
It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.
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
I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
Fernando Pessoa
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
Fernando Pessoa
Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
Fernando Pessoa
