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
Effort
Deadliest
History
Drought
Devastated
Futility
Vanity
Profound
Awareness
Plans
Severest

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I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.
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I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.
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I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
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Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.
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I don't mourn the loss of my childhood I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
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Nature is the difference between the soul and God.
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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.
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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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Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?
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The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.
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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.
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I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
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Art lies because it's social.
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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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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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To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
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Everything is theater.
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No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
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I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
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At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.
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