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
God wills, man dreams, the work is born.
Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.
My curiosity sister of larks.
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
Fraternity has subtleties.
That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.
I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
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 poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.
You breathe better when you're rich.
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.
God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.