Fernando Pessoa · 286 pages
Rating: (14.8K votes)
“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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”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
See more on GoodReads
“It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn’t destroy us, if it doesn’t burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.”
― Anne Rice, quote from Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned (Anne Rice)
“They come. Sooner than I'd thought, more than I'd even begun to fear. They come looking for death.
And Death is psyched to see 'em.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the shriek of your relations...don't be afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbours in the next house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize opportunity by the scruff of the neck.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, quote from Elizabeth and Her German Garden
“It had been different when I was the princess. Then I had looked at his flirtations with other girls and at least told myself that his heart lay there. It had been easy to think that, even though he always returned to me after every infatuation, he wanted only my friendship. And he must have held it in, kept his true feelings to himself, knowing that I would never have been allowed to marry a minor lord of Rithia, no matter what his parents might hope. I would marry for political reasons; we had both known that. There had been no reason to acknowledge that we could ever be anything more than friends. But still, it had been a thin façade, one that I could have seen through, if I had wanted to.
And when I was no longer the princess? Had I known? If I really looked, had I known? Yes, I had to admit, I had. But it was like knowing that you need air to breathe or water when you’re thirsty. Something I knew, but without ever thinking about it, without even really considering it. I had held Kiernan’s heart for so long that I had forgotten I had it, tucked away beneath my own.
So, yes, I had known. Hadn’t his face inserted itself between Tyr and me, no matter how I tried to forget it? Hadn’t I felt somehow guilty when I’d kissed Tyr, as if I were betraying Kiernan? And hadn’t he come looking for me in Treb, hadn’t he been with me every day he could since I returned to the city? I had told Philantha otherwise, but hadn’t I felt strange with him for weeks, awkward, knowing somewhere inside me that things between us were changing?
Or maybe they weren’t changing. Maybe they were just now becoming what they had always wanted to be.
What I wanted them to be.
Because I did. I had felt it in that one kiss, how things could be. And I wanted it. Oh, how I wanted it.
But I had thrown it all away, by putting that spell on Kiernan against his will, by keeping him from doing what he thought he must do to protect me. I had seen the look of shock on his face when I used my magic on him. I didn’t know how he would be able to forgive me, after that.
I had destroyed my chance at happiness with the one person who had always understood me.
All to save the kingdom that had abandoned me, or maybe just to prove to myself that I was worth something.”
― Eilis O'Neal, quote from The False Princess
“There were nights when I left the sessions physically and emotionally drained after hearing the anguish pour out like blood from a gaping wound. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different – psychotherapy is one of the most taxing endeavors known to mankind; I’ve done all sorts of work, from picking carrots in the scorching sun to sitting on national committees in paneled board rooms, and there’s nothing that compares to confronting human misery hour after hour and bearing the responsibility for easing that misery using only one’s mind and mouth. At its best it’s tremendously uplifting as you watch the patient open up, breathe, let go of the pain. At its worst is like surfing in a cesspool struggling for balance while being slapped with wave after putrid wave.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, quote from When the Bough Breaks
Good Me, Bad Me
Salt Sugar Fat: How...
Allegiance of Honor
Will in the World: H...
Der Held unserer Zei...
My Life in Black and...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
