Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.
I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.
Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.
Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.
For I am the size of what I see
not my height's size.
To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers.
Here lies, in the small extreme beach, the Captain Of The End.
Caeiro unterläuft die Unterscheidung zwischen dem Schein und dem, was etwa "Denkerge-danken" hinter ihm ausmachen wollen. Die Dinge, wie er sie sieht, sind als was sie scheinen. Sein Pan-Deismus basiert auf einer Ding-Metaphysik, die in der modernen Dichtung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts noch Schule machen sollte.
If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.
I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.
It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.
Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. None has more consistently tried to find his real self with its multiplicity intact and to keep his poems impersonal. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: wrote poetry under four names — his own and three 'heteronyms'. Not pseudonyms: they are imaginary poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos and himself; each strongly distinct from the others. One is soon struck by an external difference between their poems...
Art lies because it's social.
I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.
When I write, I solemnly visit myself.
Life is a thread that someone entangled.