"Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious."
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Quote collection
Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 8 of 16)
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes."
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"But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice."
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"When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial."
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"The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!"
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"Fraternity has subtleties."
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"Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
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"Life is good, but Wine is better."
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"My joy is as painful as my pain."
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"One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard."
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"The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life."
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"Writing is like paying myself a formal visit."
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"Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!"
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"In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god."
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"I know nothing and my heart aches"
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"Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion."
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"Art lies because it's social."
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"I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing."
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"I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me."
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"What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it."
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