916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

Primeiro estranha-se. Depois entranha-se”.

After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth – clear skies; moist brilliant earth – greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.

I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or what I am.

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping. For me there’s no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake.

If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.

Money can’t buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things.