Fernando Pessoa

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

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 …

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

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

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

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

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.

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

I say it because I don't believe.

I don't believe in the landscape.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.

My head and the universe ache me.

And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true.And when lying starts giving us pleasure, let's speak the truth so that we lie to it.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams.

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. [...] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!

All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.