Fernando Pessoa

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get …

The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.

The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and …

Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

For I am the size of what I see not my height's size.

To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers.

Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.

There's a tiredness of abstract intelligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the …

As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.

Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.

Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.

Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.

Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake.

I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.

I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.

I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, …

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

Fraternity has subtleties.