All Quotes

"When I write, I solemnly visit myself."

"Life is a thread that someone entangled."

"They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had."

"Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd."

"I exempt you of being present in my idea of you."

"That's not my love; that's just your life."

"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."

"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."

"The amazing Portuguese poet... as a fantastic invention surpasses any creation by Borges... Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist; he is Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to "my self," "the real me" or "me myself," and "my soul," and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them."

"Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. None has more consistently tried to find his real self with its multiplicity intact and to keep his poems impersonal. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: wrote poetry under four names – his own and three 'heteronyms'. Not pseudonyms: they are imaginary poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos and himself; each strongly distinct from the others. One is soon struck by an external difference between their poems..."

"Pessoa was a poet who wrote poets as well as poems."

"Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is one of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal's premier modernist. He is also a strange and original writer. Other modernists—Yeats, Pound, Eliot—invented masks through which to speak occasionally, from Michael Robartes to Hugh Selywn Mauberly to J. Alfred Prufock. Pessoa invented whole poets."

"Pessoa's writing, the whole of his extraordinary opus, a major presence in what has come to be known as "modernism" in the European languages... Almost any commentary of any length on Pessoa's writings, sensibility, and imagination is bound to convey a glimpse, at least, of its intensity and elusiveness, its apparently endlessly unfolding hall of mirrors."

"Nada en su vida es sorprendente — nada, excepto sus poemas."

"The man who never was."

"Fernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of twentieth-century poetry. From his heteronymic passion he produced, if that is the word, two of our greatest poets. Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, and a third, Ricardo Reis, who isn't bad. Pessoa is the exemplary poet of the self as other, of the poem as testament to unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy."

"Fernando Pessoa is the greatest Portuguese poet since Camões, and one of the most complex and astonishing figures of 20th-century literature."

"Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness... What makes Pessoa's thought and poetry compelling is not that he picks up and develops the forms and themes of Whitman and Emerson and retransmits our patrimony back to us—though this would be marvelous—but because in the poems and prose he has passed a judgment upon the 20th century rejection of individualism."

"The most profound poet of the twentieth century."

"[Pessoa was] Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century [though] some critics would even leave off that last qualifying phrase. [He was] one of the most appealing European modernists, equal in command and range to his contemporaries Rilke and Mandelstam."

"[Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Voltaire (& Co., if you will), whose exquisite mixed praises of human and literary folly create a polyphony unlike any other prose music you've ever heard."

"Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life – and death – [his] poems place [him] among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness."

"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."

"The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."

"Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion."

"Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittá-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship."

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

"To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated."

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t."

"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."

"I would never see a good movie for the first time on television."

"[I think] the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera."