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Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.
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
Quality
Stimulating
Attention
Perfectionist
Action
Renunciation
Dream
Detail
Character
Qualities
Better
Details
Instinct
Lead
More quotes by Fernando Pessoa
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.
Fernando Pessoa
And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
Fernando Pessoa
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Fernando Pessoa
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
I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.
Fernando Pessoa
Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
Fernando Pessoa
The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.
Fernando Pessoa
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
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
Fernando Pessoa
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
The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.
Fernando Pessoa
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
Fernando Pessoa
Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.
Fernando Pessoa
Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.
Fernando Pessoa
I know not what tomorrow will bring.
Fernando Pessoa
My boredom with everything has numbed me.
Fernando Pessoa
FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.
Fernando Pessoa
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.
Fernando Pessoa
I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.
Fernando Pessoa
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
