Quote

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
Better
Details
Instinct
Lead
Quality
Stimulating
Attention
Perfectionist
Action
Renunciation
Dream
Detail
Character
Qualities

More quotes by 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.
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I don't believe in the landscape.
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I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.
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Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
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I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.
Fernando Pessoa
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I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.
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Everything is absurd.
Fernando Pessoa
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I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
Fernando Pessoa
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All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.
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Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.
Fernando Pessoa
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I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa
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Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
Fernando Pessoa
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As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
Fernando Pessoa
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pg 9, The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.
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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Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
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Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
Fernando Pessoa
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There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Fernando Pessoa