Fernando Pessoa

There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

Ser compreendido é prostituir-se.

pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.

I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.

I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

I know nothing and my heart aches

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.

All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.