Fernando Pessoa

What is art but the denial of life?

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, …

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.

Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.

Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.

The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.

What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.

Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.

It's been a long time since I've been me.

'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end …

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.

To be understood is to prostitute yourself.

Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.