"Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination."
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Quote collection
Fernando Pessoa quotes (page 9 of 16)
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said."
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"Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one."
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"To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think."
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"To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life."
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"And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust."
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"Let's absurdify life, from east to west. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living."
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"I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner."
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"If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine."
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"And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself."
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"Everything is absurd."
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"pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation."
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"We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans."
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"These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth."
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"To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character - all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external."
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"Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows."
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"To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays."
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"I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost."
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"Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells."
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"As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written)."
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