WisdomArea — Wisdom & Inspiration

"I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me."

Fernando Pessoa

"To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent."

Fernando Pessoa

"No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may have That is part of one's self"

Fernando Pessoa

"I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man."

Fernando Pessoa

"Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speaks of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colors. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky. It comes down to the same thing - the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends of the grammarians."

Fernando Pessoa

"The human soul is an abyss"

Fernando Pessoa

"This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.]"

Fernando Pessoa

"All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn’t be love letters if they were not Ridiculous."

Fernando Pessoa

"I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories."

Fernando Pessoa

"Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being."

Fernando Pessoa

"All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness."

Fernando Pessoa

"I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me. I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come. I’m free, and against organized, clothed society. I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination."

Fernando Pessoa

"Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet"

Fernando Pessoa

"everything is absurd.1 man spends his life earning money which he then saves even though he has no children 2 leave it 2. another puts all his efforts into becoming famous so that he'll b remembered once dead, yet he doesn't believe in a survival of the soul that would give him knowledge of that fame. yet another wears himself out looking 4 things he doesn't even like."

Fernando Pessoa

"The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact."

Fernando Pessoa

"Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel."

Fernando Pessoa

"The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine."

Fernando Pessoa

"If the heart could think it would stop beating."

Fernando Pessoa

"The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men"

Fernando Pessoa

"Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates."

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa

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