"I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else."
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Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 3 of 16)
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps."
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"Strength without agility is a mere mass."
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"My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction."
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"As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes."
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"To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)"
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"La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida."
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"I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots."
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"My past is everything I failed to be."
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"The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free."
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"Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world."
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"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."
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"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it."
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"For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size."
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"All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness."
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"Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life."
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"To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours."
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"I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me."
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"For who expects nothing, all that comes is grateful"
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"If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant."
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