Quote

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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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
Almost
Distant
Around
Centre
Live
Absurd
Always
Chaos
Life
Towards
Ellipses
Like
Tend
Dispersion
Planets
Continual
Outside
Trace

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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Better to dream than to be.
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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice
Fernando Pessoa
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God wills, man dreams, the work is born.
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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Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
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.
Fernando Pessoa
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I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.
Fernando Pessoa
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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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FIRST WATCHER Why do people die? SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough.
Fernando Pessoa
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To think is to destroy.
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa
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Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.
Fernando Pessoa
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Strength without agility is a mere mass.
Fernando Pessoa
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Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
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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The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.
Fernando Pessoa
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I know nothing and my heart aches
Fernando Pessoa
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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.
Fernando Pessoa