Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.
Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.
There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, 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 conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.
Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
Fraternity has subtleties.
I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.
Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.
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.
Against destiny I fulfilled my duty .
Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.
I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. [...] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!
My life is as if you've hit me with it.
Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.
My homeland is the portuguese language.
Pessoa is the guru and his reader the neophyte to be initiated into the mysteries to which Pessoa holds the key.
Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.