Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
All beginnings are involuntary.
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.
There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality.
There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.
God gave the sea the danger and the abyss,
but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.
Fernando Pessoa was the apostle of an antidemocratic and elitist nationalism. A mystical nationalism was perhaps the only element of ideological coherence in his work. He was always marked by the radicality of his ideological and political attitudes.
I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.
Strength without agility is a mere mass.
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 justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.
I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?
I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.
My joy is as painful as my pain.
A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside.
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
Everything is worthwhile
if the soul is not small.