916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Literature simulates life. A novel is a history of what never was and a play is a novel without narrative. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, since no one speaks in verse.

Sit under the sun abdicate and be your own king.

I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.

The basest of all human needs is the need to confide, to confess. It is the soul’s need to go outside itself.

Everything belongs to someone else, except the pain of not having it.

The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions!

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.

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, enisled in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However hard one soul struggles to know another soul, he can only judge by what words are spoken – a formless shadow on the floor of his understanding.

I’d like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.