Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.
My head and the universe ache me.
The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.
Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.
The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax.
Who wants to go beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
[Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Voltaire (& Co., if you will), whose exquisite mixed praises of human and literary folly create a polyphony unlike any other prose music you've ever heard.
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.
Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.
There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
S? plural como o universo!
What is art but the denial of life?
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.
The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.
Faithful to the word given and the idea had.
All else is up to God!