Fernando Pessoa was one of the most powerful figures of the Portuguese literary world who significantly contributed to Portuguese literature of the 20th century. He was a poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher. His expansive fictional journal was not just belted out under his own name but under seventy-five other pseudonyms that he created for his works. Pessoa preferred calling them heteronyms as he believed that the word pseudonym did not capture the true essence or independent intellectual life of the names. Much unlike other notable writers who used literary personas, Pessoa gave his heteronyms a full life separate from his own, assigning each persona’s psychology, aesthetics, and politics. Coming to Pessoa’s works, during his lifetime, most of Pessoa’s considerable creative output appeared only in journals, and he published just three collections of poetry in English, ‘Antinous’, ‘Sonnets’ and ‘English Poems’. Other than this, he came up with one collection in Portuguese titled, ‘Mensagem’. However, Pessoa’s brilliance as a writer can be felt in his quotes that touch various aspects of life, such as happiness, contentment, failure, solitude, yearning, hope, regret, dreams, living, and so on. Explore this section and find out some of the most famous quotes by Fernando Pessoa.
I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
- Fernando Pessoa
I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
No sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
No posso querer ser nada.
parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
- Fernando Pessoa
I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.
We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
- Libro del desasosiego, Fernando Pessoa
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
- Poems of Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa
To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
- Fernando Pessoa
Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.
Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
- Poems of Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa
At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.
Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets?
- Poems of Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa
The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own
- Fernando Pessoa
What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.
From, The Book of Disquiet
- Fernando Pessoa
I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.
- Fernando Pessoa
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes to where life is not painful; nor is there a port of call where it is possible to forget.
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.
- Fernando Pessoa
Tenho amigos para saber quem eu sou.
- Fernando Pessoa
We, all who live, have
A life that is lived
And another life that is thought,
And the only life we have
It's the one that is divided
In right or wrong.
Pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
To act—that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...
Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.
I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.
- Fernando Pessoa
I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul
To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
 childhood, is lost. )
 )
 in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes. )
