Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
Myth is the nothing that is everything.
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.
[Pessoa was] Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century [though] some critics would even leave off that last qualifying phrase. [He was] one of the most appealing European modernists, equal in command and range to his contemporaries Rilke and Mandelstam.
Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.
Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.
Nature is the difference between the soul and God.
Fernando Pessoa is the most extraordinary poet of Orpheu and the most astonishing poetic phenomenon of this century.
It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.
Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.
I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.
If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.
Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake.
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.