"Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream."
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Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 15 of 16)
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet"
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"My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live."
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"I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality."
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"Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way."
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"My curiosity sister of larks."
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"I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!"
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"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."
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"A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?"
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"I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself."
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"Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not."
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"To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction."
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"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."
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"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."
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"In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God."
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"I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life."
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"I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague."
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"Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it."
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"Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd."
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"Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men."
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