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It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.

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
States
State
Leading
Without
Lasts
Wrote
Thinking
Happiness
Mental
Life
Last
Havens
Often
Haven
Felt
Lived
Vicarious
Else
Months
Slumber
Someone
Since
Existed

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Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
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And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
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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.
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All beginnings are involuntary.
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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.
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I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
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What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet
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God wills, man dreams, the work is born.
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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.
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The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own
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Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.
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My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.
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The human soul is an abyss
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Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.
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We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.
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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.
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Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
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Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
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Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
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If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
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