916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.

I paced from one side of the room to the other, dreaming out loud incoherent and impossible things – deeds I’d forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would already have been. And in this reverie without grandeur or calm, in this hopeless and endless dallying, I paced away my free morning, and my words – said out loud in a low voice – multiplied in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation.

However, when you’re about to write something, knowing beforehand that it’s sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory.

Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

Isn’t joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice.

Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all ends and purposes and intentions.

Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative.

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I’m nobody, absolutely nobody.