Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French...
NationalityPortuguese
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth13 June 1888
CityLisbon, Portugal
CountryPortugal
My past is everything I failed to be.
If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.
To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.
To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything.
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)
I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.
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.
Better to dream than to be.