916 Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.

Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.

So great is my tedium, so overwhelming the horror of being alive, that I cannot imagine what could possibly serve as a palliative, an antidote, a balm, a source of oblivion.

Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune.

How confidently we believe in our interpretation of other people’s words.

The search for the truth – whether the subjective truth of one’s own convictions, the objective truth of reality or the social truth of money or power – always brings with it, if the searcher in question deserves the prize, the ultimate knowledge that the truth does not exist.

Let’s absurdify life, from east to west. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.

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