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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

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
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If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings
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I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.
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The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.
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I don't believe in the landscape.
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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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I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.
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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
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The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.
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When I write, I solemnly visit myself.
Fernando Pessoa
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I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.
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.
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After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.
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The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.
Fernando Pessoa
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We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.
Fernando Pessoa
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I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.
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.
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Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.
Fernando Pessoa
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My joy is as painful as my pain.
Fernando Pessoa
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What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?
Fernando Pessoa