Fernando Pessoa

"And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream."

"There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist."

"I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself."

"To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations?Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are."

"I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city."

"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."

"In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God."

"I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality."

"Humanitarianism is rude."

"Property isn't theft: it's nothing."

"To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character — all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external."

"We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans."

"Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell."

"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."

"There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral."

"I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics."

"Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be."

"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."

"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."

"Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion."

"Imagine if, some day back in the 1950s, an American poet named John Ashbery had not only written a few of his own highly original poems, but in an ecstasy of creative surfeit, had invented three other poets — Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler — and then, over the years, proceeded to write poems as them, even entire books. It sounds fantastic, but it is what Pessoa actually did. Nor was it just a whimsical creative exercise. In The Western Canon, that ultimate literary proving ground, Harold Bloom named Caiero and de Campos as "great poets" in their own right."

"Caeiro [Fernando Pessoa] unterläuft die Unterscheidung zwischen dem Schein und dem, was etwa "Denkergedanken" hinter ihm ausmachen wollen. Die Dinge, wie er sie sieht, sind als was sie scheinen. Sein Pan-Deismus basiert auf einer Ding-Metaphysik, die in der modernen Dichtung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts noch Schule machen sollte."

"Zwischen Schlaf und Traum, // Zwischen mir und was in mir ist // Und was ich vermute zu sein, // Fließt ein unendlicher Fluss."

"Wolken ohne Schatten, // Auf der Südseite aber, // Ist ein Stückchen Himmel // Traurig blau."

"Wer leidet, leidet allein."

"Unsere größte Angst als einen Zwischenfall ohne Bedeutung ansehen, nicht nur im Leben des Weltalls, sondern in dem unserer eigenen Seele, das ist der Anfang der Weisheit. Sie mitten in der Angst so ansehen ist die vollkommene Weisheit. In dem Augenblick, in dem wir leiden, scheint der menschliche Schmerz unendlich zu sein. Doch weder ist der menschliche Schmerz unendlich, noch ist unser Schmerz mehr wert als eben ein Schmerz, den wir ertragen müssen."

"Stumm betrachte ich den See, // den eine Brise kräuselt. // Nichts weiß ich, wenn ich an das Ganze denke // Oder es ist das Ganze, das mich vergisst."

"Schlaf, dass das Leben ein Nichts ist! // Schlaf, dass alles vergeblich ist!"

"Ich habe keine Begabung zum Chef, auch nicht zum Gefolgsmann."

"Ich beneide alle Leute darum, nicht ich zu sein."

"Güte ist das Feingefühl roher Seelen."

"Diese ganze Landschaft ist nirgendwo."

"Das große Los des Lebens fällt nur denen zu, die es auf gut Glück kaufen."

"Da wir dem Leben keine Schönheit abzuringen vermögen, sollten wir zumindest versuchen, unserem Unvermögen Schönheit abzuringen."