Quote

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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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
Anyone
Idea
Someone
Ideas
Self
Never
Selves
Love
Concept
Concepts

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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My past is everything I failed to be.
Fernando Pessoa
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To be great, be whole Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.
Fernando Pessoa
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All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.
Fernando Pessoa
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Art lies because it's social.
Fernando Pessoa
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FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.
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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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
Fernando Pessoa
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Solitude desolates me company oppresses me.
Fernando Pessoa
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I know not what tomorrow will bring.
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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Liberty is the possibility of isolation.
Fernando Pessoa
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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
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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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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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I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.
Fernando Pessoa
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Fraternity has subtleties.
Fernando Pessoa
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Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.
Fernando Pessoa
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To think is to destroy.
Fernando Pessoa
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The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.
Fernando Pessoa
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...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.
Fernando Pessoa