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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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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
Since
Art
Body
Soul
Work
Least

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.
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We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
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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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.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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Literature exists because the world isn't enough.
Fernando Pessoa
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Better to dream than to be.
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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There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.
Fernando Pessoa
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Everything is theater.
Fernando Pessoa
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The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.
Fernando Pessoa
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...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.
Fernando Pessoa
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To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.
Fernando Pessoa
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What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?
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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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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I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Fernando Pessoa
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My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.
Fernando Pessoa
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All beginnings are involuntary.
Fernando Pessoa
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Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
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These pages are not my confession they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.
Fernando Pessoa
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Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do Desassossego
Fernando Pessoa