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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

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To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.
Fernando Pessoa
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Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
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Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
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I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
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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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
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I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.
Fernando Pessoa
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I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Fernando Pessoa
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Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
Fernando Pessoa
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The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
Fernando Pessoa
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Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
Fernando Pessoa
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The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.
Fernando Pessoa
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I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.
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 am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.
Fernando Pessoa
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I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
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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I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.
Fernando Pessoa
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Your poems are of interest to mankind your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Fernando Pessoa
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Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.
Fernando Pessoa