Quote

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

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
Soul
Conscience
Like
Weight
World
Emotion
Worry
Tiredness
Knowledge
Inability
Doesn
Abstract
Doe
Horrible
Body
Breathe

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
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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.
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In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.
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I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul
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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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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.
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There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
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I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.
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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To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
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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
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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
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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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
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Let's buy books so as not to read them let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there let's take long walks because we're sick of walking and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.
Fernando Pessoa
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Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?
Fernando Pessoa
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All beginnings are involuntary.
Fernando Pessoa
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Solitude desolates me company oppresses me.
Fernando Pessoa
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Myth is the nothing that is all.
Fernando Pessoa
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Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
Fernando Pessoa