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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”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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“Should churches exert any influence in politics? Should pastors preach about political questions? Is there only one “Christian” position on political issues? Does the Bible teach anything about how people should vote? I think there are some clear answers to these questions, but we have to recognize at the outset that dozens of other books and articles have already given their own answers to such questions. These books range from saying that the Bible gives outright support for many liberal Democratic positions to saying that the Bible supports conservative Republican positions.1 Some books argue that Christians have simply become far too entangled in political activities, while another important book argues that Christians have a biblical mandate to be involved in politics.2 Another widely influential book gives many real-life examples of remarkable Christian influence on laws and governments.3 One book that has received wide consideration in the United Kingdom proposes a rethinking of major political questions in light of the Bible’s priority of personal relationships.4 There have been a few recent books by theologians and biblical scholars dealing at a more theoretical level with the question of Christian perspectives on politics.5 In this book I start out by explaining what seem to me to be five clearly wrong (and harmful) views about Christians and politics: (1) “government should compel religion,” (2) “government should exclude religion,” (3) “all government is evil and demonic,” (4) “the church should do evangelism, not politics,” and (5) “the church should do politics, not evangelism.” As an alternative, I argue for what I think to be the correct view: (6) “significant Christian influence on government.”
― Wayne A. Grudem, quote from Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture
“But before either of us can speak again, I feel crackle-crackle-crackle. I can't tell what's going to happen next. My seizure begins to spin slowly through me. What will my dad do? Whatever it is, in another moment I'll be flying free. Either way, whatever he does, I'll be soaring.”
― Terry Trueman, quote from Stuck in Neutral
“If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”
― Max Ehrmann, quote from Desiderata: Words For Life
“Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East . . .
On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert - Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes.
In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich meridian . . .
And the trains went from East to West, and from West to East . . .”
― Chingiz Aitmatov, quote from The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
“Life for me had already lost much of its pulp; the edges were collapsing into the center, and in that gap was the sympathy Peter had sought all his life and never got from anyone. Or perhaps "sympathy" was the wrong word; what he was telling me was more confirmation of what I already understood in biblical terms: the bad Peter, under the influence of the Devil, did horrible things. His honesty was evidence that the good Peter was finally triumphing over the bad one, because to me, that was the whole point of confession -- to figure out where you've gone wrong and to stop sinning.”
― Margaux Fragoso, quote from Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir
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