Quote

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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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
Others
Place
Flee
Live
Surround
Even
Forced
Crowds
Unless
Alone
Away

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
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To love is to tire of being alone it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)
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Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.
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Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
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I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.
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Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.
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I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.
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
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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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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
Fernando Pessoa
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Better to dream than to be.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.
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
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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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My joy is as painful as my pain.
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa
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But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.
Fernando Pessoa