6 Quotes by Pessoa

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet

A bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mine and at the same time something external, something not in my power to change. Ah, how often my own dreams have raised up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves its equal

These of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

This worship of Humanity, with its rituals of Liberty and Equality, always struck me as like being a revival of the ancient cults, in which animals were gods or the gods bore the heads of animals.

Cesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: „Better to be first in the village then the second in Rome!” I'm nothing in the village and nothing in the Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from Rua de Assuncao to the Rua de Vitoria; he's Cesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?

The sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness