So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I'll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Education of the Stoic
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
- Everything is worthwhile
- If the soul isn't small.
FERNANDO PESSOA, "Mar Português"
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Myth is the nothing that is all.
FERNANDO PESSOA, "Ulisses"
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.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Education of the Stoic
We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
- Without madness what is man
- But a wholesome beast,
- Postponed corpse that begets?
FERNANDO PESSOA, "D. Sebastião"
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Better to dream than to be.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Education of the Stoic
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
FERNANDO PESSOA, attributed, A Taste of Heaven
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
- Oh salty sea, how much of your salt
- Is tears from Portugal?
FERNANDO PESSOA, "Mar Português"
One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquietude
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
- These are Fortunate Islands,
- These are lands without a place.
FERNANDO PESSOA, "As Ilhas Afortunadas"
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
To live is to be other. To feel is impossible if we feel as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same as yesterday is to not feel it is to recall today what we felt yesterday. It is to be the living skeleton of what yesterday was our life, the living skeleton of something lost, never to return.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
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