"There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful."
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Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 2 of 16)
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"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
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"To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing. Be whole in everything."
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"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."
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"Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words."
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"I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have."
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"I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul."
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"I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted."
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"I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist."
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"Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle."
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"If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave."
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"I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice."
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"Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny."
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"To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect."
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"Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns."
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"We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky."
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"Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming."
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"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."
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"I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up."
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"In order to understand, I destroyed myself."
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