"I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am."
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Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 4 of 16)
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"At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void."
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"Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates."
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"My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while."
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"Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
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"We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin."
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"I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror."
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"Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?"
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"I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been."
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"I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays."
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"My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone."
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"To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet."
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"I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul."
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"Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am."
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"I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room."
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"There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness"
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"I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing."
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"Oh salty sea, how much of your salt Is tears from Portugal?"
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"The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."
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"There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist."
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