"The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!"
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Quote collection
Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 1 of 16)
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."
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"Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
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"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony."
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"The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere."
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"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love."
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"There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist."
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"Everything interests me, but nothing holds me."
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"I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world."
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"It's been a long time since I've been me."
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"I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided."
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"I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing."
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"I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me."
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"I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything."
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"Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small."
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"I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect"
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"Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."
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"We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect."
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"There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don't dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves"
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"Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way."
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