FPFernando Pessoa

104 collected words

Fernando Pessoa

Life dates: 1888 AD — 1935 AD

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1911 AD

But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

Fernando Pessoa / quote

02c. 1911 AD

I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

Fernando Pessoa / quote

03c. 1911 AD

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

Fernando Pessoa / quote

04c. 1911 AD

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Fernando Pessoa / quote

05c. 1911 AD

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.

Fernando Pessoa / quote

06c. 1911 AD

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

Fernando Pessoa / quote

07c. 1911 AD

There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.

Fernando Pessoa / quote

08c. 1911 AD

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

Fernando Pessoa / quote