Fernando Pessoa · 286 pages
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“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“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. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
Fernando Pessoa
Born place: in Lisbon, Portugal
Born date June 13, 1888
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“He doesn't need to be reminded you're great.”
― Greg Behrendt, quote from He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
“The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
“Dogs can never speak the language of humans, and humans can never speak the language of dogs. But many dogs can understand almost every word humans say, while humans seldom learn to recognize more than half a dozen barks, if that. And barks are only a small part of the dog language. A wagging tail can mean so many things. Humans know that it means a dog is pleased, but not what a dog is saying about his pleasedness. (Really, it is very clever of humans to understand a wagging tail at all, as they have no tails of their own.) Then there are the snufflings and sniffings, the pricking of ears—all meaning different things. And many, many words are expressed by a dog’s eyes.”
― Dodie Smith, quote from The 101 Dalmatians
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