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My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

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
Shadow
Present
Gone
Soul
Presence

More quotes by Fernando Pessoa

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I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
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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.
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Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
Fernando Pessoa
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Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
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In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
Fernando Pessoa
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I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.
Fernando Pessoa
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What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet
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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And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.
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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Everything is absurd.
Fernando Pessoa
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I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.
Fernando Pessoa
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At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.
Fernando Pessoa
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I know not what tomorrow will bring.
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
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But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.
Fernando Pessoa
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My curiosity sister of larks.
Fernando Pessoa
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It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.
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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God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.
Fernando Pessoa