Fernando Pessoa

Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.

What would happen to the world if we were human?

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

Everything is absurd.

For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the …

We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect.

And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.

If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.

Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.

Art lies because it's social.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

My homeland is the Portuguese language.

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live …

My curiosity sister of larks.

Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.

My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?

I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be …

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.

Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.