916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root.

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.