Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
That's not my love; that's just your life.
Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams.
And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.
Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life — and death — [Pessoa is one of the] modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary richness.
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.
Liberty is the possibility of isolation.
To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
I don't believe in the landscape.
And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true.
Without madness what is man
more than the healthy beast,
corpse adjourned that procreates?
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.
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, amorality and hiperexcitation.
'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 of the world we were seeking.
Pessoa is the master of reversals in the literature.
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
What would happen to the world if we were human?