Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
... And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.
The Gods sell when they give.
Glory is paid for with disgrace.
Poor are the happy, for they are
Just what passes.
A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today.
Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.
For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about whatever unimportant and curious is going on.
[...] The supreme honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic.
All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things, of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take an interest in others in order to take care of himself.
To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations?
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.
I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.
Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.
They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it.
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.
You breathe better when you're rich.
Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.
Fernando Pessoa is the greatest Portuguese poet since Vax de Camoes, of the Renaissance. He established modernism in Portugal and deeply influenced the language. It is said that even Lisbon chambermaids speak differently from their grandparents because of him.