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Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

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
Slaves
Slave
Wise
Action
Men

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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THIRD WATCHER Let her speak. Don't interrupt. She knows words that mermaids taught her...I'm falling asleep in order to hear her...Go on, sister, go on...My heart aches because I wasn't you when you dreamed at the seashore.
Fernando Pessoa
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I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.
Fernando Pessoa
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Your poems are of interest to mankind your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Fernando Pessoa
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No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa
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And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
Fernando Pessoa
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My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.
Fernando Pessoa
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I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
Fernando Pessoa
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Better to dream than to be.
Fernando Pessoa
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Art lies because it's social.
Fernando Pessoa
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I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
Fernando Pessoa
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Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
Fernando Pessoa
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The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
Fernando Pessoa
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My curiosity sister of larks.
Fernando Pessoa
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I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
Fernando Pessoa
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Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.
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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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
Fernando Pessoa
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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