"We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence."
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Quote collection
Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 13 of 16)
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world."
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"To think is to destroy."
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"I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity."
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"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."
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"The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man."
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"Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one."
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"Life is whatever we conceive it to be."
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"Every gesture is a revolutionary act."
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"Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy."
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"I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics."
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"Faithful to the word given and the idea had."
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"I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought."
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"To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky."
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"I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved... I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living."
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"Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move."
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"Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice"
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"All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it."
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"All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does."
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"There is no safe standard to tell man from animals."
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