Quote

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.

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
History
Drought
Devastated
Futility
Vanity
Profound
Awareness
Plans
Severest
Effort
Deadliest

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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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!
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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
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FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.
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Better to dream than to be.
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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.
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There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves
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Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?
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Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
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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.
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Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
Fernando Pessoa
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Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
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In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.
Fernando Pessoa
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I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
Fernando Pessoa
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There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.
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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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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Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice
Fernando Pessoa
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Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
Fernando Pessoa