Fernando Pessoa
From "A Factless Autobiography"
I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.
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 never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.
... And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.
I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.
I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.
Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake.
Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.
What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.
Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.
You breathe better when you're rich.
I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
My life is as if you've hit me with it.
There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.
To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
To be understood is to prostitute yourself.
What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
Enthusiasm is rude.
Art lies because it's social.
We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect.
What would happen to the world if we were human?
Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.
That's not my love; that's just your life.
To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations? Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are.
From “Os Grandes Trechos”
To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character -- all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.
...
Nobody gets tired of dreaming, for dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn't weigh and is a sleepless dream in which we are awake.
...
So. Does de Campos's shouting frighten you?
Yes, I know it's all quite natural,
But I still have a heart.
Shit and good night!
(Burst into smithereens, O heart!)
(Shit to all of humanity!)
(from "Yes, I Know It's All Quite Natural")
So here is Ricardo Reis, perfectionist and physician
The seeker will find in all things
The abyss, and doubt in himself.
or
I don't know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.
And here is Alvaro de Campos, engineer and orgiast
I always want to be the thing I feel kinship with. . . .
To feel everything in every way,
To hold all opinions,
To be sincere contradicting oneself every minute . . .
Or Pessoa, the traditionalist, in the well-known "Autopsychography"
The poet is a faker
Who's so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
and…
as Alberto Caeiro: "The Keeper of Herds"
I have no ambitions and no desires.
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It's my way of being alone.
as Ricardo Reis :
As long as I feel the full breeze in my hair
And see the sun shining strong on the leaves,
I will not ask for more.
What better thing could destiny give me
Than the sensual passing of life in moments
Of ignorance like this?
as Álvaro de Campos: "The Tobacco Shop" :
I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
more of Fernando Pessoa