Eu Eu > Eu's Quotes

“I placidly wait for what I don't know-
My future and the future of everything.
In the end there will only be silence except
Where the waves of the sea bathe nothing.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it’s not me.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

“All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.
I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.
I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time...
No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can’t even light the next cigarette... If it’s an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems

“There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't wish to be, and don't even wish to be taken for being.
Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us. [23](Zenith trans.)”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are. (76)”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

“I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“If I were someone else, I’d go along with you all.
But since I’m what I am, lay off!
Go to hell without me,
Or let me go there by myself!
Why do we have to go together?”
― fernando pessoa

“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).”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We, all who live, have
A life that is lived
And another life that is thought,
And the only life we have
It's the one that is divided
In right or wrong.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Each of us is several, is many,is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. Livro Do Desassossego”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude