Explore Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.

Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

I never meant to be but a dreamer.

Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

The idea of any social obligation ... just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.

It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.

I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.

The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.