Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
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.
Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.
The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.
Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
Life is a thread that someone entangled.
When I write, I solemnly visit myself.
Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.
To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.