Quote

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Fernando Pessoa

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Isolated
Absurd
Impossible
Thing
Never
Mystic

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Image
Better to dream than to be.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Let's buy books so as not to read them let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there let's take long walks because we're sick of walking and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Multipliquei-me para me sentir.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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
Image
I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
I know not what tomorrow will bring.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
Literature exists because the world isn't enough.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
...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
Image
I don't mourn the loss of my childhood I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
Fernando Pessoa
Image
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