916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

I exist unconsciously and I’ll die unwillingly. I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway-house between things, like myself, that are nothing. How disquieting it is to feel, how troubling it is to think, how vain to want!

The world belongs to who doesn’t feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

Having touched Christ’s feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering-the long and the slow kind-has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of profoundly felt convalescence”.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

What’s most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.

In everything I am an intense, rather coarse dilettante.

Those who really suffer don’t form groups, don’t go around in a gang. Those who suffer suffer alone.

At first I felt dizzy – not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that’s like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.