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Fernando Pessoa

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Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
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Topic: Philosophical
May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Happiness
The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed--they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach--the image that best expresses the child's happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they're lost or taken from him (A crime! They've made off with outward bits of his soul! They've stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Happiness
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Happiness
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Life
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Life
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.
From Poems of Fernando Pessoa
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Topic: Death, Life
Dreaming is a confession of one's need to live, with real life simply being replaced by unreal life, to compensate for the irrepressible urge to live.

What does all this amount to but the search for happiness? And does anyone search for anything else?
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Happiness
Everything wearies me, including what doesn't weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Happiness
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
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Topic: Life, Philosophical
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
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Topic: Philosophical
Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays; of love, which wearies; of life, which surfeits but never satisfies; and even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for.
From The Book of Disquiet
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Topic: Hope
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Hope
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life
Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Philosophical
May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed--they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach--the image that best expresses the child's happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they're lost or taken from him (A crime! They've made off with outward bits of his soul! They've stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life
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.
From Poems of Fernando Pessoa
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Death, Life
Dreaming is a confession of one's need to live, with real life simply being replaced by unreal life, to compensate for the irrepressible urge to live.

What does all this amount to but the search for happiness? And does anyone search for anything else?
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
Everything wearies me, including what doesn't weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life, Philosophical
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Philosophical
Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays; of love, which wearies; of life, which surfeits but never satisfies; and even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Hope
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Hope
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life
Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Philosophical
May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed--they buy little dreams. They become children in the act of acquisition. When people with money succumb to the charms of those useless little objects, they possess them with the joy of a child gathering sea shells on the beach--the image that best expresses the child's happiness. He gathers shells on the beach! No two are ever alike for a child. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones in his hand, and when they're lost or taken from him (A crime! They've made off with outward bits of his soul! They've stolen pieces of his dream!), he weeps like a God robbed of a just-created universe.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life
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.
From Poems of Fernando Pessoa
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Death, Life
Dreaming is a confession of one's need to live, with real life simply being replaced by unreal life, to compensate for the irrepressible urge to live.

What does all this amount to but the search for happiness? And does anyone search for anything else?
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
Everything wearies me, including what doesn't weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Happiness
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life, Philosophical
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.
From The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Philosophical
Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays; of love, which wearies; of life, which surfeits but never satisfies; and even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Hope
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Hope
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
From The Book of Disquiet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Life