Naba’a > Naba’a's Quotes

“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 , The Book of Disquiet

“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, The Book of Disquiet

“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, The Book of Disquiet

“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, The Book of Disquiet

“Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“what has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“My boredom with everything has numbed me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“إنها القاعدة الأولي يا أخي: إن الطريقة التي نرى فيها الله ما هي إلا انعكاس للطريقة التي نرى فيها أنفسنا.فإذا لم يكن الله يجلب إلى عقولنا سوى الخوف والملامة ،فهذا يعني أن قدرا كبيرا من الخوف والملامة يتدفق في نفوسنا. أما إذا رأينا الله مفعما بالمحبة والرحمة ،فإننا نكون كذلك.”
― إليف شافاق, The Forty Rules of Love