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Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

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
Giving
Sordid
Liberation
Illusion
Gives
Business
Art

More quotes by 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
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If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
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I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
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I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.
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After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.
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As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
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Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.
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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.
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I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
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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.
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Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
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I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
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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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Your poems are of interest to mankind your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
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The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
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If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
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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.
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There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
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Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
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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.
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