916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don’t know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

I’ve reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

I never go to where’s a risk. I’m frightened of dangers down to boredom.

That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations. The presence of others – always such an unexpected event for the soul – grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble. I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can’t look reality in the eye.

There’s a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face. That’s what’s most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom.

Deze bladzijden, waarop ik dingen noteer die slechts helder voor me zijn terwijl ik ze schrijf, heb ik juist herlezen en nu vraag ik mij af: wat is dit en waar dient dit voor? Wie ben ik wanneer ik voel? Wat sterft in mij wanneer ik ben? Zoals iemand die van grote hoogte het leven in een dal tracht te zien, zo beschouw ik mijzelf vanaf een bergtop en ben daarbij een onduidelijk rommelig landschap.

I’m a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.