Quote

We worship perfection because we can't have it if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

Fernando Pessoa

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Imperfect
Perfection
Worship
Humanity
Would
Inhuman
Reject
Rejects

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Image
Solitude desolates me company oppresses me.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Everything is absurd.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
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.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
Fernando Pessoa
Image
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!
Fernando Pessoa
Image
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
My curiosity sister of larks.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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